Florence

FLORENCE

FLORENCE. Originally a center of Roman provincial government and commerce, Florence in the Middle Ages became an important bishopric, a county nominally subject to the Holy Roman Emperor, and, by 1138, a commune. Beginning in 1125 with the capture of its nearby rival, Fiesole, Florence embarked on a policy of Tuscan expansion that would culminate in the mid-sixteenth century with its conquest of Siena and its position as the capital of Tuscany. A hub of banking, commerce, and textiles, it was, along with Venice, Milan, Rome, and Naples, one of the five powers of Renaissance Italy as well as the axis of Renaissance Italian culture. Its history throughout the early modern era was bound to the Medici family, who dominated it either unofficially or, after 1530, as lords. With the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici in 1737, Florence and its territory became a fief of the House of Lorraine.

THE FLORENTINE CONSTITUTION

With the exile of most of the Medici in 1494, the republic, dominated by the friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), broadened the government by establishing a Great Council of some three thousand members. But with the return of the Medici in 1530, the oligarchy redrew the constitution. Alessandro de' Medici (1510–1537) became capo (head) and, shortly thereafter, "duke of the republic of Florence." The four-man Magistrato Supremo replaced the Signoria ; the Consiglio de' 200 (Council of Two Hundred) and Senato de' 48 (Senate of Forty-Eight), whose members served for life, replaced the Consiglio Maggiore (Great Council). As of 1537, the old criminal courts of the Executors of the Ordinances of Justice and Podestà (chief magistrate) were consolidated in the Otto di Guardia e di Balìa (Eight on Public Safety), though, despite ducal attempts at centralization, some two dozen other bodies exercised criminal justice functions. As of 1569, the ruler held the title grand duke of Tuscany from the pope.

POLITICS

Although the arrival in Italy of Charles VIII of France in 1494 seemed the fulfillment of Savonarola's apocalyptic preaching, the friar's pro-French policy, antithetical to the position of Pope Alexander VI, and his defiance of a papal excommunication led to his execution in 1498. In 1512, the Medici, headed by Cardinal Giovanni (the future Pope Leo X [reigned 1513–1521] and the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent), returned as lords, but fled in 1527 following the sack of Rome. In 1530, pro-Medici troops forced the fall of the last Florentine republic. Although the Medici would, from now on, rule as lords, Florence's patriciate proved resilient: 90 percent of appointees to the Senate during the sixteenth century came from families who had served in the Signoria the century before.

Florence became the capital of an important medium-sized state in the early modern period. As of 1537, it was ruled by one of the most talented of the Medici, Duke Cosimo I (1519–1574), who succeeded in establishing considerable Florentine independence. By the early eighteenth century, Florence was paying huge subsidies to Austria, one of the costs of attempted neutrality. In the last weeks of the reign of the childless Gian Gastone de' Medici (1671–1737), several thousand Austrian troops occupied the city, and upon his death the grand duchy passed to the House of Lorraine.

The Medici dukes allied Tuscany with the Catholic states of Europe through both policy and marriages. Cosimo I, for instance, married into the House of Toledo; his progeny made marriage alliances with the Habsburgs, the royal house of France, and the House of Lorraine. Catherine de Médicis (1518–1589), wife of Henry II of France, was a daughter of Lorenzo of Urbino, and Marie de Médicis (1573–1642), wife of Henry IV of France, was a daughter of Francesco. Catherine's daughter Elizabeth married Philip II of Spain, and a son married Mary Stuart. Cosimo III (1642–1723) paired his daughter with Johann Wilhelm, elector of the Palatinate.

SCIENCE, ART, AND CULTURE

Florence's enduring fame rests on its place in Renaissance and early modern culture. The humanists Coluccio Salutati, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola all worked in Florence. In the early sixteenth century, the Rucellai family hosted gatherings of Florentine patricians in the family's palace gardens, the Orti Oricellari, where Niccolò Machiavelli explained to the literati gathered there the principles of his Discourses; indeed, scholars trace the political realism of Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) to modes of thought developed by participants in the Rucellai garden conversations.

Florence remained a center of learning through the early modern era. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) served as a Medici court mathematician and as tutor to the future Cosimo II (1590–1621), and left some of his scientific instruments to Ferdinando II (1610–1670), a man of real scientific bent. Another of Galileo's legacies was a "core of Tuscan Galileans" (Cochrane, p. 232), many of whom gathered at the learned academy popularly known as the Cimento, patronized and organized by prince Leopoldo, son of Cosimo II.

Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), a diplomat, scientist, and writer whose interests ranged from geometry to air pressure to collecting bawdy poetry in several languages, belonged to the Accademia della Crusca and served as secretary of the Accademia del Cimento. When the latter disbanded in the second half of the seventeenth century, its members spread its ideas throughout Europe. Cosimo III (1642–1723) patronized medical research, including the work of his personal physician, Francesco Redi (1626–1698), whose critique of the received wisdom of the Greek physician Galen led to a more modern approach to health and pharmacology. Several Medici grand dukes also made it their policy to extend health care to even the more remote parts of their domain.

The Medici and other patrons sought out the best artists and humanists of the day. Florence was at the forefront of mannerism, with the architecture of Michelangelo (the stairs of the Laurentian Library, 1524–1526) and the paintings of Jacopo Pontormo (The Visitation in the Church of the Annunziata, 1514–1516, and The Deposition in the Church of Santa Felicità, 1526–1528), Parmigianino (The Madonna with the Long Neck, c. 1535), and the works of Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari (best known for his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects and the Uffizi, or public office building, 1559–1565). The city was an energetic participant in the Italian baroque movement; Artemesia Gentileschi enjoyed the patronage of Cosimo II, completed Judith and Her Maidservant around 1614, and was admitted to Florence's Accademia del Disegno.

FINANCE AND ECONOMY

Florence remained economically stable, even prosperous, until the recession, accelerated by the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), of the 1620s. Cosimo I and his successors, especially Ferdinando I, lavished time and money on the acquisition and improvement of Livorno, which became Tuscany's main port and a sanctuary for merchants of all nations and creeds. In the reign of Francesco, a wave of palace construction reflected increased patrician investment in buildings.

Florence's economic power rested upon two industries, international banking and textiles, though the great Medici bank collapsed by 1494. Good raw wool, imported from England, Spain, and elsewhere, was spun by thousands of country women and then woven into cloth on looms. Until the mid-fourteenth century, women dominated the weaving trade, but were then replaced by German immigrant males. By the late sixteenth century, women once again flocked to the trade, and they constituted nearly two-thirds of wool weavers by 1604.

Smaller but still important was Florence's silk industry, producing high-quality, luxury goods. Women played important roles in cultivating mulberry trees, harvesting the leaves on which the silkworms fed, caring for the silk cocoons, and spinning the raw silk into thread. As with the wool industry, women tended to carry out production tasks associated with plain cloth, not with fine, highly decorative textiles.

Other important industries included international trade, printing, and glassmaking. Florentine merchants could be found in every corner of Europe. Cosimo I subsidized the press of Laurens Lenaerts (known in Florence as Lorenzo Torrentino), who published works in the vernacular, Latin, and Greek, among them the first edition of Vasari's Lives (1550). Torrentino's successors served as printers to the grand dukes until the late eighteenth century. A painting by Giovanni Maria Butteri from the early 1570s of a glass factory, built for Francesco I, hints at the importance of that industry.

POPULATION

In 1427 Florence held about 40,000 permanent inhabitants, not including clergy, about one-third of its estimated population prior to the Black Death of 1348. The 1552 census counted about 60,000 residents, including clergy. The number rose to about 75,000 by 1600. The population was unusually literate; between a quarter and a third of Florentines could read and write during the Renaissance.

Florence had animportantJewishcommunityby the early thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, Jews were relegated to a very fewprofessions, notably pawnbroking. The Savonarolan republic's attemptin 1495 to expel them failed. Cosimo I granted substantial privileges to Jewish bankers in Tuscany and forbade anti-Semitic acts. In the 1550s, he opened Tuscany to settlement by Jews, an invitation accepted by many Iberian Jews, who created the first important Sephardic community in Italy. In 1571, Jews in Florence were moved to a ghetto, where they enjoyed considerable internal autonomy and where, by the century's end, they had built two synagogues. The Jewish physician Elia Montalto di Luna worked at the Medici court in the seventeenth century and produced learned scientific treatises. Although the entry of Napoleonic armies into Florence in 1799 resulted in the emancipation of the Jews, the return of the Habsburgs in 1815 forced them back into the ghetto, from which they were definitively liberated only with Italian unification.

See also Banking and Credit ; Florence, Art in ; Galileo Galilei ; Gentileschi, Artemisia ; Humanists and Humanism ; Italy ; Jews and Judaism ; Macchiavelli, Niccolò ; Medici Family ; Plague ; Renaissance ; Vasari, Giorgio .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Florentine Histories. Translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Princeton, 1988. Translation of Istorie fiorentine. Florence's history as compiled, on commission from the Medici, by this astute political observer.

Secondary Sources

Acton, Harold. The Last Medici. Rev. ed. New York, 1980. A lively portrait of the late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Medici grand dukes.

Brackett, John K. Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992. Analyzes the Florentine criminal justice system in the late Renaissance.

Cochrane, Eric. Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. Chicago and London, 1983. Colorful and well written; an impressionistic work for the general public with several chapters on the late Renaissance.

Hale, J. R. Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control. London, 1977. A history of the Medici and their relationship with Florence from the early Renaissance through the reign of Gian Gastone.

Litchfield, R. Burr. Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790. Princeton, 1986. Catalogues the resilience of the Florentine elite over the longue durée.

Menning, Carol Bresnahan. Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pietà of Florence. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993. A scholarly work on Florence's charitable pawn shop through the late sixteenth century.

Carol M. Bresnahan