Florentine political history

1From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and especially during the “republican” era when the city became the herald of “Florentine liberty” (Florentina libertas), Florence was a key reference point for western political history. Precociously freed from the shackles of feudalism, barring a few subsequent dark passages, for two and a half centuries Florence was the site of true political reinvention, as Moses I. Finley and Christian Meier have defined it: [1] it boasted public debate on political matters, supported by procedures that allowed citizens to enjoy institutionalised political participation. But the city also demonstrated its powers of political reinvention in the way in which it ultimately dealt with power struggles and intrigues out in the public sphere, rather than in the shadows; such struggles and intrigues unfolding in a partially professionalised and largely autonomous realm, especially with regard to religion. Although the origins and early days of the Florence comune (the medieval “commune”, which would become a “township” or “municipality”) remain partially unknown, it was through the assertion of the popolo (“the people”), working closely with the guilds, that it became a leading city. Along with Venice and Genoa, during the Renaissance it was one of the city-states that resisted the rise of the new noble dynasties for the longest – the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, and the Este and Ferrara in Modena. In contemporary discourse and representation, Florence embodied the “popular” version of the Republic, whereas the Doges of Venice represented its “aristocratic” form. The political transformations that Florence experimented with as early as the thirteenth century included inventing (or reinventing) deliberative and electoral techniques and the forms of voting that would become standard in modern politics. The city-state gradually broke with the world of feudalism, imperial political theology, and the associated institutional and ideological forms of authority. Several centuries before the idea of popular sovereignty would take hold, a quasi-federal political community initially based on guilds (the Arti) and other groups with a specific status recognised by the city (districts, Guelph partisan organisations, etc.), which had been typical in medieval townships, gradually gave way to a more unified republic over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

2Politics in the Tuscan city were both strikingly similar to and fundamentally different from ours. Several aspects warrant our attention with regard to this point. Public deliberation grew in importance, especially from the end of the fourteenth century, but took place in quasi-informal assemblies – the consulte e pratiche – which addressed relevant questions on an almost daily basis, and not in legislative councils, which would become the “natural” habitat for such discussions a few centuries later. Elections and majority ballot voting were adopted and refined but, until the end of the fifteenth century, these electoral forms were not combined with the notion of popular consent, otherwise typical of modern representative governments. Florence witnessed the emergence of a true political class, and one that was virtually professionalised given that it practised this activity full-time. This political class was dominated by the great families that wielded broad political influence through their vast networks. But the city also saw a rise in the active participation of thousands of citizens in the management of public affairs through a mix of co-option, lotteries and the rapid turnover of mandates. In addition, Florence developed a number of modern administrative techniques, such as a proportional tax system based on a highly precise census of property and moveable wealth across the territory of a vast state in the process of establishing itself; in the fifteenth century, this territory included the entire Arno valley, from the Apennines to the sea, as far as Pisa and Livorno. It was also in Florence that the modern concept of the republic was created: when Leonardo Bruni contrasted a republican regime with princely government, the “republic” became more than just a synonym for good governance. However, the official ideology of the Tuscan city was marked by an ideal form of political representation that was not representation by mandate, but rather the appointment of the most impartial, fair and useful individuals for collective harmony, forming a pars pro toto that could represent the body politic.

3Florentine political experimentation can to a certain extent be compared to the discovery of perspective in the visual arts, the creation of modern philology by humanists working on classical texts, or the invention of pioneering financial, commercial, and banking techniques (large companies pooling together multiple forms of capital, double-entry accounting, etc.). Merchants, tradesmen, and bankers were the social classes that supported the comuni, which in turn vigorously defended their interests. Florence’s historical originality in the political realm had parallels in the artistic and intellectual spheres, as well as in the world of economics and finance. The conceptual tools and individuals involved circulated between domains that today we consider to be completely separate: Dante, Bruni, Machiavelli and Guicciardini were all highly political active; Michelangelo and Brunelleschi oversaw the city’s fortifications and helped fight against the princes threatening the city.

4For two centuries, the Tuscan city asserted itself as the centre of the Renaissance. Since Athens and then Rome, no western metropolis had been the site of such historical innovation. The Florentine experiment triggered major developments in political thought: this was the birthplace of what intellectual historians call “civic humanism”, or the confluence of humanism as an intellectual trend and municipal traditions that demanded a certain level of political freedom for citizens. While Machiavelli embodies the apex of a trajectory of realistic political thought that marked the birth of political science, he was far from being unique – in fact, he was in dialogue with many thinkers who are today less well known, such as Francesco Guicciardini and Donato Giannotti. Tuscan historians establish a crucial link between the chroniclers of the Middle Ages and modern historiography. In short, Florence is an ideal case study for observing the shift from a medieval political episteme to a modern political one.

Objectives

5As the historiographical analyses conducted by Lorenzo Tanzini included in the French version of this issue demonstrate, Florence has been the subject of an exceptional number of historical works, making it the most widely studied Renaissance city in Europe. These studies are part of a broader dialogue, begun in the fourteenth century, between politics, political thought, and history. [2] However, Tanzini shows how a major shift in the orientation, broad paradigms, and objectives of studies of the political history of Florence occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, and continued to inform the field until just a few decades ago. Following Hans Baron and Nicolai Rubinstein, a large swath of authors have idealised the political history of Florence to the extent that they viewed the “Machiavellian moment” as the birth of modern political thought. [3] On the other hand, sociologists working from a different historical perspective have suggested that we should nuance the actual scope of the “republican liberty” touted by the Florentine regime by highlighting the role of the multiple social networks (districts, alliances, economic partnerships, etc.) that were indispensable for the exercise and control of power, as well as for political domination. Drawing primarily from large databases, these scholars have examined the complex relationships between politics, economics, religion and prominent families in Florence, thus improving our understanding of how institutions and socio-political logic operated during the course of these two and a half centuries. [4]

6These studies were made possible thanks to a number of important and largely preserved archives, the density of whose holdings is exceptional for the time period. [5] Not until the revolutionary and republican periods of later centuries do we find archives comparable to those in Florence, which provide information about the composition of political personnel and the functioning of legislative activity, as well as containing the transcription of major public debates, private epistolary exchanges between high-profile leaders and “ordinary” citizens, and statistics on economic development and financial policy. By pairing archival research with conceptual innovation, modern historiography has been able to revise political understanding of the Florentine Republic, away from the influence of literary sources and ideological debates.

7Unfortunately, these works, primarily penned by Italian, English, or to a lesser extent, German speakers, have generally not been translated into French. [6] This crucial chapter of western political history is thus poorly understood in France, especially in the field of political science. One only has to consult the bibliographical references cited by Bernard Manin, a pioneer in the field, to realise this, as almost no French texts are cited. [7] French researchers have studied Florentine art, culture and economics, but they have largely overlooked politics. Only Machiavelli, and to a much lesser extent, Guicciardini, Savonarola and Bruni have warranted studies, mainly conducted by intellectual historians and philosophers. [8] The number of studies conducted from the perspective of the social history of politics or even just traditional political history can be counted on two hands. [9] Consequently, the Republic of Florence and its political experiments are largely overlooked by French political scientists, and are likewise absent from public debate – despite the fact that Florence, and Italian comuni in general, could and should be a second pillar of political science research on the history of republican and democratic politics prior to the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside the well-known examples of Greek and Roman Antiquity.

8The purpose of this issue of the Revue française de science politique is thus to begin to address such lacunae and establish a better understanding of this particularly important moment in western political history. As Lorenzo Tanzini’s bibliographic essay demonstrates, recent Italian historiography has sought to better integrate Florence within the central and northern Italian municipalities; a region which, from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, constituted a major locus of political innovation and engaged in constant exchanges and complex relationships. From this perspective, it seems promising to compare and contrast a variety of historical studies, including some in French, [10] in order to establish a broad overview of the field. Such an overview becomes even more informative once we realise, as recent work and the article by Hagen Keller in this issue have suggested, that the diversity of institutions, the growing complexity of practices, and the multiplicity of forces at play make it impossible to propose a single, unifying model for the political trajectories of cities. [11] Moreover, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Italian Wars made historiography focused on a single city, or even just northern and central Italy, obsolete; Guicciardini was doubtless the first historian to realise this. [12] As Tanzini has explained, we are witnessing “a sort of end to the historiographical ‘primacy’ of the Tuscan capital, and the birth of a new approach that goes beyond Florence”. [13] There is little doubt that with the current development of global and transnational history, which makes greater room for non-European political experiences, this shift will be further accentuated. Florence nevertheless remains a particularly important focal point, less as a model for “the people’s city” or “the birthplace of modernity”, or because it was “unique”, but because the city was characterised by particularly diverse experiments in government and institutional configurations, as well as by the richness and constant renewal of its social and political life. [14] From this perspective, Florence is less of an exception than an ideal observation point. The current decentring of historical perspective thus draws on vast prior investigations, and it is indispensable for French researchers to take stock of these.

9Focused on the city of Florence, this issue proposes a three-pronged approach. The first dimension involves combining political history with political science. This undertaking is less evident than it might initially appear. It is true that “political science”, rather than being a specific, clearly defined science with its own concepts and methods, is or should be an institutional umbrella that allows disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology to enter into dialogue regarding political matters. However, the references required, theories employed and issues raised can end up becoming separate from institutional boundaries to the extent that mutual understanding is no longer easily achieved. This difficulty only increases when the historical topic being addressed and the literature attempting to shed light on it are almost completely absent from the usual reference landscape of political scientists. To this end, we have chosen to call upon authors who are primarily historians. Readers from the field of political science should therefore not be surprised if they do not come across certain familiar and regularly invoked concepts. We have included explanatory notes in order to facilitate their reading of these texts.

10The second consideration, though lesser in scope, was selecting texts that had originally been written in Italian (and one in German), rather than texts in English. Anglo-Saxon literature on Florentine history is indispensable, and repeatedly cited throughout this issue. For obvious linguistic reasons, however, it is already more accessible to most French-speaking readers. It thus seemed important to highlight other historical contributions, in order to facilitate a dialogue that went beyond Italian and German researchers alone.

11Thirdly, we have chosen to adopt as our key focus the constitutional and legal procedures that allow political communities to make decisions, and more specifically, to elect their leaders. Of course, politics cannot be reduced to these procedures alone; however, it is scarcely possible without them. We have thus selected contributions which, through a series of cross-sections, allow readers to gain a global understanding of municipal life in Florence outside of periods of democratisation or highly charged political events – the most important of which is perhaps the Ciompi wool-workers revolt in 1378, which is already accessible to French readers in a recent in-depth study. [15]

12From Voltaire and Jacob Burckhardt to Richard Goldthwaite and John F. Padgett, for decades Florence has been treated as the “ultimate historical laboratory” for studying the birth of modernity and the economic, political and cultural transformations that this budding “modernity” is said to have produced or accompanied. Three major issues, all intricately linked, have informed this endeavour: cultural modernity as expressed by civic humanism; the implementation of a capitalist economy, and the social organisation associated with it; and the construction of republican political liberty (Florentina libertas [16]) in acts and in theory. [17] This issue of the Revue française de science politique is devoted to this last element, viewed from the angle of decision-making and electoral procedures. We have adopted a multi-factorial approach to explain the dynamics and scope of these mechanisms. They would be meaningless without the social actors who simultaneously promote and exploit them; the articles by Laura De Angelis and Riccardo Fubini specifically endeavour to describe the full depth of these practices. While Florence certainly reinvented politics, the latter was first and foremost the business of the reggimento, the socio-political group that, having mastered their inner workings, persistently engaged in political activities, and whose members continually moved from one position to another, often in competition with one another. [18] In medieval and Renaissance Florence, much like today, procedures were also instruments that could be used for tactical coups, to disqualify a rival or encourage certain tendencies; all the actors involved consequently prized them highly, as shown in the articles contributed by Piero Gualtieri, Riccardo Fubini and Nicolai Rubinstein. Nonetheless, we must be careful not to view the interactions that these procedures authorised as a relatively direct application of the normative and constitutional ideals put forth by contemporary figures, and more specifically by the brilliant intellectuals that Florence produced or attracted (Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Machiavelli, Coluccio Salutati and Francesco Guicciardini). It is also important to consider seriously the normative frameworks for action, as they – sometimes very specifically – can explain why a certain procedure was adopted, but also because they constitute reservoirs of meaning on which both critics and apologists drew. [19] Analysing the uniqueness of the normative framework that dominated the Italian comuni and Florence in particular – while highlighting its coherence, tensions and evolution – is a necessary part of any global analysis, as shown in the articles contributed by Hagen Keller and Laura De Angelis. Finally, these institutional mechanisms possessed their own logic and weight, which went beyond their various social, instrumental and ideological uses. This dimension is highlighted in the articles by Hagen Keller, Piero Gualtieri, Riccardo Fubini and Nicolai Rubinstein, the latter forcefully reminding the reader of constraints that were as “trivial” as they were inescapable, such as the difficulty of reaching the required quorum in a society made up of very busy merchants, or the material dimension of such mechanisms, with a big enough room to host the Grand Council’s sessions being a prerequisite for the Council’s very existence.

A multi-century history in political experimentation

13One of the advantages of working on Florentine political experimentation is that it has such a long history. [20] A city of Roman origin, the seat of a bishopric since the third century, and the residence of Tuscany’s Carolingian marquesses, for many decades Florence remained an “invisible township”, [21] less because of lacunae in its archives than due to the very nature of its institutions. The significant changes that the city witnessed at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries did not, in fact, immediately translate into a clearly defined political regime, in the hands of a limited aristocracy surrounding the bishop or the consulate. The consulate’s sphere of influence, when described in the existing documents, was for a long time limited to foreign relations and criminal justice. For decades, the city was governed by various and competing factions. Starting in the 1170s and 1180s, the need to control the expanding territory around Florence granted the city’s consuls (consules civitatis) – most often recruited among the milites, the traditional aristocracy [22] – more clearly defined functions; these consuls would ultimately come to dominate the city’s government by the end of the twelfth century. [23] By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Florence had acquired a clear collective political identity that allowed it to distance itself from imperial supervision. Hagen Keller has proposed a global analysis of the political practices of the Italian municipalities for this era, rather than focusing on Florence alone.

14During this period, Florence experienced great demographic growth, going from some 10,000 inhabitants c.1175 to 60,000 in the middle of the thirteenth century, ultimately peaking in the 1320s and 1330s with perhaps 120,000 residents. During the decades prior to the arrival of the Black Death (1348-1350), Florence was by population one of the largest cities in Europe, just behind Paris, [24] as well as one of the most opulent. Over the course of the thirteenth century, it became a major economic hub, in terms of trade, industry (centred on the production of wool and silk), and finance. Its trading companies, both well-established and powerful, and possessing significant capital, had established branches in all the main European cities and along the Mediterranean, thus becoming the financiers to the popes and princes. [25]

15However, this prosperity was not based on a fixed political system. At the end of the thirteenth century, the popolo, which united the leading elements of the social classes promoted by the rise in industry, commerce and finance, emerged victorious from its fight against the former governing class, the milites, who were disqualified as “magnates” whose violence might disturb the social order. [26] From then on, the “regime of the popolo”, strongly supported by the guilds, established itself, creating the Priorato delle Arte (“Priors of the guilds”, 1282) and excluding the magnates through the Ordinances of Justice (the first of which was passed in 1293). In a few decades, the number of offices proliferated, each with more precisely defined functions, alongside an increasing number of civil servants. The city-state thus adopted political tools that would allow it to govern a rapidly expanding territory at the regional level. [27] Florentine politics were based on the broad participation of citizens and had no equivalent elsewhere on the peninsula. It even involved artisans and semi-skilled tradesmen, albeit limiting their role to the large assemblies and junior offices. [28] Although the city’s institutional framework underwent no profound changes after 1295 until the end of the fifteenth century, it was nevertheless subjected to many additions and revisions. These were rarely seen as radical departures, but rather as a gradual shift from the exceptional use of a rule to its standard use. For example, the lottery system used to appoint certain office holders from the end of the thirteenth century ultimately became in 1328 the official mode of selection for the priors and the Gonfaloniere of Justice, the most important members of the executive branch, as Piero Gualtieri analyses in this issue. Likewise, Riccardo Fubini shows how extraordinary recourse to a balìa (the delegation, for a set period of time, of the political and administrative powers held by an officer or council to a special select committee, in general composed of ten citizens), which already played a significant role in 1363, became an almost permanent monitoring instrument after the return of Cosimo de Medici in 1434. These changes were in response to the instability of Florentine politics, which would become a major intellectual topic for Machiavelli in his Florentine Histories. [29] The Histories overflow with accounts of feuds and revolts, conspiracies and coups d’état; most of the time, the victory of one camp led to the massive exile of another in order to ensure social peace. [30] Major political crises in turn produced “regime” changes, in the sense that historians of Florence have given to the term “reggimento”, defined above. As Gene Brucker has compellingly shown, constitutional stability can mask deep modifications in a political system. This led him to contrast the “popular” version of the “guild regime”, which anchored political functioning in the world of craftsmen and artisans in the wake of the 1378 Ciompi Revolt, with the version that succeeded it from 1382 and began to stabilise at the end of the 1390s. [31] A small group of wealthy citizens then took power, fully participating in politics while vigorously affirming their commitment to republican institutions and strengthening consensus among the dominant class and citizens in general by involving a significant number of the latter in the management of public affairs. Ricardo Fubini and Laura De Angelis study these dynamics in their contributions to this issue.

16While Cosimo de Medici seized power upon his return to Florence in the fall of 1434 after a year in exile, this did not, however, provoke a real constitutional revolution. The Medici family established a sort of invisible or masked Signoria that has often been studied and whose relative continuity with the period preceding it is highlighted by Riccardo Fubini. [32] True changes only began to occur at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1494, the Medicis were once against ousted from power. As the Italian Wars began, Florence experimented with a new institutional system, established around a “Grand Council” that imitated Venetian institutions but whose political dynamics differed quite radically from those of the “Most Serene Republic” and in turn gave rise to one of Florence’s most “popular” eras. This phase of Florentine history is better documented in French-language research, in part thanks to the impressive work conducted by Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini. The guilds were consequently relegated to a secondary role and no longer provided the framework for the organisation of political life. In this issue, Nicolai Rubinstein examines how the Grand Council operated, based on the electoral procedures defined between 1495 and 1499. Florence’s political and institutional history then experienced a more than three-decade long period of political struggle that ultimately led to the Republic’s demise and the creation of the Duchy of Florence (1530-1532). The profound transformation of institutional mechanisms, the assertion of a hereditary dynasty, and the pope’s, then the Holy Roman Emperor’s, recognition of the Grand Duchy all combined to establish a new state, which would only disappear when Tuscany became part of unified Italy some three centuries later.

An invisible princely regime?

21The evolution of Florence’s political regime from the end of the fourteenth century has often been described as an oligarchical transformation. After the failure of the 1378-1382 popular regime and the disappearance of the guild regime, a small number of families, long present in positions of state power, are said to have stolen political power, thus subsequently facilitating the Medici power grab (the family would almost always retain a foothold in Florence after 1434). However, this outline only crudely begins to account for the numerous and contradictory modifications of the Florentine political system: while the city broke away from its historical institutions, the number of citizens eligible to govern increased considerably and the latter’s commitment to the republican tradition did not appear to waver during the fifteenth century. This is the apparent paradox that we must resolve. [40]

22Alongside the creation of the Council of Two Hundred in 1411, the era’s main deliberative body, what the Florentines called the reggimento also emerged: a group of men who were deemed eligible to hold the highest political positions in the Republic, thus constituting an active political class. Viewed in a broad sense, the group was relatively large – about 2000 citizens – but its core was composed of a more limited number of families, loyal to the faction in power and with long-standing access to political posts. This de facto institutionalisation means that this group is sometimes viewed as a form of aristocracy that monopolised power over the long term. Formally, such an analysis is largely justified: after the two important moments when the government opened its doors to new members – in the 1340s, during the last guild government, after Gautier de Brienne was ousted from power, and then again between 1378 and 1382 – few new families were allowed to become part of the Signoria during the fifteenth century, marking a period of social closure. [41] But the perspective of a stable political class over time masks a number of deep transformations in its nature and the values it espoused. While the popolo was essentially held at arm’s length from political power, the major political conflicts that shook city life led the ruling class to break dramatically with the values of the former consular class, in order to adopt those promoted by the popolo during the thirteenth century. The importance of consensus, the common good, and the dignity of all citizens, which had been the backbone of the guild’s political agenda, was thus enshrined at the heart of Florentine republicanism. [42] The scope of this transformation can be seen in the Grand Council, which inaugurated a period of open access to the government at the end of 1494: by the following year, the new institution already included close to 3500 citizens. But the admission criteria were no longer those required by the guilds. They stemmed instead from the new political conceptions of Florentine republicanism, which placed “wisdom”, handed down by elders who had already been in power, at the centre of its selection mechanism. Grand Council members had to be the sons, grandsons or great-grandsons of men who had been permitted to hold the highest offices – priors of the guilds, who in the middle of the fifteenth century successively became the “Priors of Liberty”, the “Good Men” and finally the gonfalonieri. [43] The Grand Council facilitated access to power and fostered greater equality among citizens; it acquired the right to appoint the city’s judges and the power to confirm, with a two-thirds majority, any proposal approved by the Signoria, the Collegi and the Council of the Eighty, before it passed into law. Nevertheless, the Republic was based on birth privilege, a blood right (jus sanguinis) that was therefore not the sole purview of the aristocracy.

23Was this fifteenth-century oligarchy, which was formally interrupted in 1494, in fact a princely regime in disguise, implemented upon the return of Cosimo de Medici in 1434? It appears that the Florentine political system did not experience any real constitutional changes, at least not before the Pazzi attempt to assassinate Lorenzo de Medici and his brother Giuliano in Florence’s cathedral in April 1478. During these first few decades, Cosimo the Elder did not hold more positions than notable professional politicians. He served twice on the twelve-man Buonomini (“the Good Men”) confraternity, twice as one of the sixteen gonfalonieri, and three times as the Gonfaloniere of Justice (the highest position), a total of only two years in power. However, even though no one was ignorant of Cosimo de Medici’s immense wealth or the connections he had established within and without Florence, he presented himself as a simple citizen from a “popular” family, eager to gain the support of his fellow citizens. He employed practices that had been adopted by the Albizzi, an opposing faction in power since the end of the fourteenth century, to skilfully manipulate the electoral system. Without formally altering the voting rules, which established the list of citizens deemed fit to rule and from which names were randomly drawn, Cosimo increasingly relied on “handpicked” elections: in other words, co-option pure and simple by scrutineers favourable to the regime, thanks to the intervention of plenipotentiary magistracies (balìe) composed of loyalists. From this point of view, the “masked dominance” of the Medici family was based less on institutional processes, and more on consensus-building through the mobilisation of personal networks (friends, relatives, neighbours, and acquaintances), as well as artistic, intellectual and religious patronage. From Cosimo to Lorenzo, the power of the Medici family certainly became more personalised: after 1478, the political system was reorganised so as to concentrate more power on this family and allow it to better control the whole system. However, the constitutional foundations of the former comune were ultimately not challenged.

Three methodological and theoretical issues

24Taking these crucial historiographical questions as their starting point, the articles in this issue will attempt to tackle three methodological and theoretical issues that are likely to interest political scientists across a variety of disciplines.