Pasquale Villari

“ Among the Florentines it was a very common practice to keep a daily register of events, and in this wise their splendid store of historic literature was continually enlarged. But, nevertheless, no history bristles with so many difficulties as that of Florence, nor offers so many apparently insurmountable contradictions. Events pass before our eyes, well described, vividly coloured; they flit past in a rapid and uninterrupted whirl, never resting, subject to no law, and seemingly obedient to chance alone. ”

“ In reading old chronicles of contemporary events, we see before our eyes the living, speaking figures of Giano della Bella, Farinata degli Uberti, Corso Donati, and Michele di Lando. Their feelings, loves, and hates are known and almost familiar to us; but we are plunged in a restless, unrestrained tumult of passions, without knowing whence blows the blast driving men and things onward in a whirl of confusion, without one moment's truce. No sooner do we pass beyond the visual horizon of the writer, than all images become confused, and our sight is no less obscured than his own. ”

“ Spain withdrew her garrisons from Tuscany, and Austrian soldiers took their place and swore fealty to the grand-duke on the 5th of February 1737. He expired on the 9th of July of the same year. Such was the end of the younger branch of the Medici, which had found Tuscany a prosperous country, where art, letters, commerce, industry and agriculture flourished, and left her poor and decayed in all ways, drained by taxation, and oppressed by laws contrary to every principle of sound economy, downtrodden by the clergy, and burdened by a weak and vicious aristocracy. ”

“ The democratic spirit was far too lively in Florence for these devices to assure the safety of the nobles, much less their return to power; but they had the effect of stirring the masses to a burning and irresistible thirst for power, and of awakening revolutionary passions in the mob. Thus, at the moment of finally losing their old supremacy in the city, the nobles achieved the revenge of bequeathing to Florence a prolonged inheritance of strife that kept the Republic divided, and hastened its fall. ”

“ Both in his art and in his politics he leant upon the people. The more oppressive his government, the more did he seek in his verses to incite the public to festivities and lull it to slumber by sensual enjoyments. In his Ballate, or songs for dancing, and more especially in his carnival songs, a kind of verse invented by himself, Lorenzo displayed all the best qualities and worst defects of his muse. Marvellously and spontaneously elegant, very truthful and fresh in style, fertile in fancy and rich in colour, they are often of a most revolting indecency. ”

“ This progress becomes more apparent from year to year, so that even in examining the statutes, the very same conflict of antagonistic elements which we have already noted, throughout the entire history of the communes and of Italian civilisation, is brought before our eyes in civil wars, in sanguinary struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, in art, in literature, in all things. It is true that the statutes only treat of juridical ideas and enactments; but these seem to strive with the same ardour, and to aim at the same ends, as the men whom they control. ”

“ The younger, the gentler and less ambitious of the pair, was quickly removed from the world. Lorenzo, on the contrary, at once seized the reins of state with a firm grasp, and was, chronologically, the second of the great men bestowed upon Italy by the house of Medici. In literary talent he was immensely superior to Cosimo, but greatly his inferior in the conduct of the commercial affairs of the house. In politics he had nobler conceptions and higher ambitions, but he was more easily carried away by his passions, less prudent in his revenge, and more disposed to tyranny. ”

“ At every turn, among the Priors, the Gonfaloniers, and ambassadors, or at hot debates in council, we meet with Dante Alighieri, Brunetto Latini, Giovanni Villani, Dino Compagni, and Guido Cavalcanti, the creators of Italian poetry and prose. The Divine Comedy bristles with continual allusions to the events, amid which it was conceived, and which all seem to be informed by the same spirit, since, even in a thousand varying garbs, it always asserts its identity. ”

“ The literature of Provence, the romance of chivalry, the poems arranged in the cycles of Charlemagne, the Round Table, the Nibelungen Lied, the innumerable ballads, the splendid cathedrals reared on both banks of the Rhine and constituting an art never to be surpassed by its countless imitators, were one and all the offspring of the mighty, primitive culture of the Middle Ages, in which, for a long time, Italy had no share. In Northern Europe, where conquerors and conquered amalgamated with less difficulty, national art and literature were sooner able to spring into being. ”

“ We see that they all took a continuous and eager share in political life, inasmuch as every guild was an independent, self-ruling institution, with separate magistrates, laws, statutes, and councils, and that it became a centre of industrial, intellectual, and political activity. Thanks to this freedom of circulation, the pulse of the Florentine people was quickened to redoubled strength, and every faculty of the human mind, all moral and political energy of which man is capable, suddenly rose to a prodigious height in Florence. ”

“ All old and new institutions seem at war, all struggling in vain for supremacy, when suddenly the Commune arises to solve the problem, and the era of freedom begins. But what gave birth to the Commune? This is the question by which we are always confronted.
It would be outside our present purpose to follow the learned scholars who have sought to deduce ingenious and complicated theories from some doubtful phrase in an old codex, or the vague words of some chronicler. It is certain that the Roman Empire was an aggregation of municipalities exercising self-government. ”

“ Was not this belief justified by the fate of Milan, Cremona, and Brescia? This was why the Florentines called the Guelph cities to their side, and in the name of Italy, freedom, and their common independence, united them all in a defensive alliance against the foreign foe. Nevertheless they had also leagued with King Robert and espoused the cause of France and the Pope, whose triumph was destined to prove fatal to Italian liberty and independence. As we have previously shown, the nation could only be built up on the ruins and by the destruction of both parties. ”

“ With the Romans, on the contrary, the conception of the family is stronger than the ties of blood; the unity of the family depends at first on an absolute paternal despotism, afterwards destroyed by the authority of the State, which to a great extent assumes its place.
From this time the State is predominant in all things; it reduces the family to fragments, and aims at the complete equality of all without having the strength to consolidate a society in which neither individual liberty, local activity, nor free associations were allowed sufficient scope for their development. ”

“ The chief citizens of Pisa and all the wealthier families left the country, preferring to live in Lombardy, France, or even in Sicily under the Aragonese, where at least they enjoyed civil equality, rather than remain in their own city subject to the harsh and tyrannous rule of Florentine shopkeepers. The commerce and industry of Pisa, her navy, her merchant-fleet, all vanished when freedom fell; while her Studio, or university, one of the old glories of Italy, and afterwards reconstituted by the Medici, was done away with, and the city soon reduced to a state of squalid desolation. ”

“ But, in truth, though public law and penal law might readily be altered under the rule of the conqueror, there was little likelihood that the civil law which, for so many centuries, had filtered into the usages and into the very blood of the Romans, which had regulated the manifold relations of a civilised people and satisfied its countless requirements, should perish utterly beneath the sword of barbarians unconscious of those requirements and not always able to comprehend those relations. ”

“ Taking a general view of the new constitution, with all its intricate multiplicity of councils and magistracies, our first impression is that all was confusion and arbitrary rule. But on looking more closely into the purpose for which it had been formed, we are obliged to admit that this government was singularly well adapted for success. Civil war is not yet stamped out: on the contrary, must undoubtedly continue for a long time; democracy is pressing on towards the fulness of its triumph and the complete destruction of the aristocracy. ”

“ Were we to exclude trade associations from the conditions of the period, we should have to admit the existence, at that day, of the modern workman, isolated and independent: a decided impossibility in the Middle Ages. Those were times in which every trade was exercised by distinct groups of families, and handed down by them as a tradition from father to son. Frequently, even offices of the State were the monopoly of certain families. ”

“ The history of every Italian republic may be divided into two chief periods: the origin of the commune, the development of its constitution and its liberties. In the first period, during which an old state of society is decaying and a new one arising, it is hard to distinguish the history of any one commune from that of the rest, inasmuch as it treats of Goths, Longobards, Greeks, and Franks, who dominate the greater part of Italy in turn, reducing the country, almost throughout its extent, to identical conditions. ”

“ During the Middle Ages the Italian Commune had been a fertile cause of progress; but as its possessions outside the walls began to increase, it proved wholly powerless to convert the free city into what we call a State without working radical changes in its constitution. In fact, even in Florence, the most democratic of our communes, citizens were only to be found within the circuit of the walls. Laws were framed to ameliorate the condition of the territory outside and to abolish serfdom there, but no one contemplated endowing inhabitants of the contado with political rights. ”

“ Memory instinctively carries us back to the Florence of old with its council and its Consuls, yearly taking the field united and agreed, for the purpose of abasing the nobles and clearing the highways for the march of its trade; and then, having reduced the hostile barons one by one, compelling them to live within the walls, subject to the equal pressure of republican laws;—to the times when the State could only overcome its more powerful neighbours by emancipating the slaves of the soil and granting political privileges to traders hitherto unpossessed of any such rights. ”

“ When the Florentines succeeded in destroying the castles of feudal and Ghibelline nobles scattered over their territory, and in forcing the conquered to inhabit the city, the Republic became split, as we have seen, in two parties, constantly at strife: the one composed of Ghibelline lords, the other of Guelph popolani. When the Hohenstauffens of Naples and Palermo called all the Ghibellines of Italy to arms, the magnates of the party took the lead in Tuscany, with Frederic and Manfred to back them, again dominated Florence and drove out the Guelphs. ”

“ It is in fact the discovery of this law that has at once thrown a new light upon the whole history of Roman jurisprudence, which we perceive to have been always and unceasingly governed by it, and thus forced to assume a character so constant and continuous through all its various transformations, that what had before seemed to be a series of distinct legislations takes an entirely new aspect, making us spectators, as it were, of the evolution of a single idea, the progressive development of a work of Nature. ”

“ But in all these laws we always recognise the consequences of commerce being divided and split into a multitude of separate associations with statutes of their own, judges of their own, and an exuberance of vitality. At the same time, we recognise that the central authority, though aware that its natural rights are threatened and usurped on all sides, continues to exert its influence, without method, indeed, or uniformity, but not without vigour, and occasionally even with violence. ”

“ In the Commune, government and public policy have an importance unknown to barbaric society, but the Commune still wears the character of a powerful assemblage of small associations rather than of a single society, or of a State in the true and strict sense of the word. Life indeed courses more swiftly through these numberless groups,409 and is quickened by their activity. Social vigour is chiefly to be looked for in family cliques, and in the Companies of the Arts and Trades, of the Nobles and of the Burghers, all of whom have laws, statutes, magistrates, and tribunals of their own. ”