Firenze Nel Quattrocento - Molho, Anthony - 2006 - Roma - Edizioni Di Storia e Letteratura - 9788884982988 - Anna's Archive

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ANTHONY MOLHO
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ANTHONY MOLHO
«bIRENZE
NESOUATKEROCENTO
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POLITICA E FISCALITÀ
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ROMA 2006
Prima edizione: giugno 2006
Tutti i diritti riservati
ISBN 88-8498-298-7

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Digitized by the Internet Archive
. In 2023 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/firenzenelquattr0000molh
CONTENTS
AO CHOEUR AURA RESP A -
1. Polis/Comune: Reflections on a Comparison ................

Zee ronase and the state im ary Modem aly” 00
3. Cosimo de’ Medici: Pater Patriae or Padrino?................
4. Tre città-stato e i loro debiti pubblici. Quesiti e ipotesi sulla storia
CL rirenize: Genova Venezia ce enn cce
Créditeurs de Florence en 1347. Un apercu statistique du quartier
CIEE SADLORD DIE Om. sparc le Gass, eas Sea Aries RS
Lamministrazione del debito pubblico a Firenze nel quindicesimo
SECO E EE PR III ME TOSI SA Ro tas, Pat
Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Monte. A Note on Sources (with Gio-
VON LAT CRITICA E e ATZORI)
The State and Public Finance: a Hypothesis Based on the History
fie abe VIC Cys OR CNC lenta
2: Società e fisco nell’interpretazione di Elio Conti..............
OMS Closing ofthe Hlorentine Archives tan
DUO
AD NS SORA DOUCE E
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AT = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio delle Tratte

Balie = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Balie
BNF = Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze
Catasto = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Catasto
CS = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane
Manoscritti = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Manoscritti
MAP = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo Avanti il Principato
Monte Comune = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Monte Comune
NA = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano
PR = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri
Prestanze = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio delle prestanze
Places of Original Publication

Chapter 1: in City-States in Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. by Anthony Molho,
Kurt Raaflaub and Julia Emlen, Stuttgard and Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991, pp.
626-639.
Chapter 2: in Klientelsysteme im Europa der Friihen Neuzeit, Herausgegeben von

Antoni Maczak, Munchen, Historisches Kolleg, pp. 233-242.
Chapter 3: in Stanford Italian Studies, I, 1979, pp. 5-34.
Chapter 4: in Italia 1350-1450: Tra crisi, trasformazione, svuluppo, Pistoia: Centro

italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, 1993, pp. 185-215.
Chapter 5: in La Toscane et les Toscans autour de la Renaissance. Cadres de vie,
société, croyances. Mélanges offerts a Charles de la Roncière, Université de Pro-
vence, 1999 pp: 77-23.
Chapter 6: in I ceti dirigenti in Toscana nel Quattrocento, Florence, Papafava, 1987,

pp. 191-207.
Chapter 7: in Rinascimento, 37, 1997, pp. 243-282.

Chapter 8: in Origini dello Stato. Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioe-
vo ed età moderna, ed. by Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Molho and Pierangelo
Schiera, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1994, pp. 225-280.
Chapter 9: in La società fiorentina nel basso Medioevo. Per Elio Conti, Roma, Isti-
tuto storico italiano per il Medioevo, 1995, pp. 41-60.
Chapter 10: in The Journal of Modern History, 60, no. 2, 1988, pp. 290-299.
INTRODUCTION
The articles that are included in this book first appeared in print
between the 1970s and the 1990s. They all draw on information found in
the Archivio di Stato of Florence, and are focused overwhelmingly on the
history of Florence from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries.
In this sense, they bespeak my scholarly interests of those years. In a more
general sense, I would like to think that they also express broader interests
which animated the community of Florentine, and more generally Italian,
historians at a time when the history of Florence had become a vital and
truly international laboratory of historical studies. Quite aside from the Flo-
rentine State Archives, which without much exaggeration I could have
defined as my intellectual home for much of the time when I was working
on these studies, during those years I was closely associated with two other
institutions: Brown University, where I taught for many years starting in
1966, and the Universita degli Studi in Florence, where I studied in the early
1960s, returning there frequently over the following two decades and then,
in the early 1980s, for more than two years of an intense and highly satis-
factory period of teaching. My interests during the years of my scholarly
apprenticeship thus bespeak most directly the scholarly (and I dare add,
ideological) orientation that prevailed in north America in the 1960s, where
I began my professional training. But my interests also were profoundly
coloured in my more than two years of study in the Facoltà di Lettere e
Filosofia ot the University of Florence, where regular attendance in Ernesto
Sestan’s and Eugenio Garin’ classes led me to questions that, I suspect, I
would have otherwise discovered much later, if at all. In short, nearly from
the very start of my professional training, I became aware, and was drawn
to some of the intellectual tensions between Anglophone (mostly Ameri-
can) historiography of the post World War II decades and scholarly inter-
ests then cultivated by Italian historians.
Many of this book’s chapters were originally written for special occa-
sions, and were meant to address issues that had been identified by the
2 FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
organizers of conferences and seminars. In some other cases, the pieces

here published were first delivered as lectures to university audiences. Yet,
despite their heterogeneity of conception and initial elaboration, it seems to
me that these ten essays rather accurately convey my continuing interest in
questions of political power, its articulation (or expression) in a society to
which, at least over the past century and a half, historians have imputed sev-
eral key characteristics of modernity, but which, increasingly in the past two
or so decades, younger historians have tended to see in very different terms,
often inspired by anthropological studies. Above all, these studies bespeak
my continuing interest in the history of the state. More precisely, one of the
recurring questions in my mind has been the degree to which it might still
possible today to sustain Jacob Burckhardt’s initial (if frequently misunder-
stood) meditation on the conceptual and psychological links between the
modernity of the nineteenth century state and the emergence of new state
forms and a new conception of political power at the time of the Italian
Renaissance.
Questions of this sort had occupied my attention since my days as a doc-
toral student in the early 1960s, under the supervision of the late Marvin
Becker, an inspiring and ever generous teacher. In my very first year of
study with him (academic year 1961-1962), he guided my readings through
four books which, in retrospect, exercised much influence on the initial,
rather long period of my orientation in the field of Florentine historiogra-
phy: Hans Baron’s Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (then only avail-
able in its first, two-volume edition), Eugenio Garin’s Umanesimo italiano,
Gaetano Salvemini’s Magnati e popolani, and Antonio Anzilotti’s La crisi
costituzionale della repubblica fiorentina. Soon thereafter, I discovered Fe-
derico Chabod, some of whose essays had recently been published in Eng-
lish, and Garrett Mattingly’s study of European diplomacy. Prodded as I
was by Becker’s penetrating intelligence and infectious enthusiasm, the
combination of these readings led me to the conviction that I devote my
dissertation to some aspect of that particularly interesting interface of poli-
tics and culture that Becker had himself begun exploring in the preceding
decade. His focus had been the first half of the fourteenth century, while I
(with his encouragement) thought that I wanted to explore the later period,
what, then, in the available if thin bibliography, went by the name of the era
of the Albizzi oligarchy. Baron and Garin offered powerful insights into
that period. Or so it seemed then. For their part, Anzilotti, Chabod, and to
an extent Mattingly had set the terms on which one could conduct a dis-
cussion on the history of the state, as that term and the history attached to
it were understood in the first half of the twentieth century. I had greater
difficulty understanding what to make of Salvemini’s classic account of late
thirteenth-century Florentine politics, especially since Becker had insisted
INTRODUCTION 3
that I write a paper (my first paper for him, if I remember right) about
Salvemini’s ideas, in light of Nicola Ottokar’s powerful, if somewhat acer-
bic, critique of them.
There is another point about my historiographic preparation that is
worth recalling, for it helps to account, or so it seems to me, the perspec-
tive from which, as a young scholar, I approached the task of writing my
dissertation and my first professional publications. In light of my more
recent interests, and of the sort of advice I now give my own doctoral stu-
dents, it is ironic that any sort of comparative perspective was glaringly
absent from my intellectual preparation. In my imagination (as well, I dare
suggest, as in that of a substantial majority of Florentinists in the first quar-
ter of a century or so following World War II), Renaissance Florence rep-
resented an almost self-contained world, a society worth studying on its
own right and without a necessary reference to other contemporary Italian
city-states, or even to its own history in later centuries. To be sure, in the
Anglophone academic world, where I had begun my professional training,
few scholars were, at the time, interested in the histories of other Italian
cities or regions. Roberto Lopez at Yale was perhaps the one great histori-
an teaching in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, whose interests
encompassed the history of the fifteenth century, and whose field of vision
was truly comparative. But I did not come under Lopez’s influence until
much later. For a very long time, mine remained firmly an “internalist” per-
spective. I would try to understand the history of Florence by studying it
from the inside, examining its political processes, its social structures, the
emergence of a political culture among its politically engaged classes, the
mercantile/entrepreneurial ideology among its merchants and artisans and
other such questions, with one common characteristic among them: an
almost (and in retrospect an almost unbelievably) naive conviction regard-
ing the self-referentiality of Florentine history. Few among us in those years
betrayed much interest in setting the history of Florence within the context
of Imperial history (as German historians had done from the early nine-
teenth century until the 1930s); fewer still were those ready to embrace an
explicitly Marxist perspective, thus setting Florence within a broader con-
text of European economic and social history. Even fewer were willing to
adopt the risorgizzento ideology and its attendant national discourse, which
was still not uncommon among our Italian colleagues. Much Anglophone
(but not necessarily only Anglophone) historiography of Florence was lim-
ited by such narrow perspective.
Historians of Florence might in fact labour under the handicap of such
narrow, self referential, and non-comparative perspectives. But one of the
reasons contributing to this condition has always been intimately attached
to one of the principal attractions that Florentine history has held to gen-
erations of historians: the city’s Archivio di Stato. This great institution,

which until about fifteen years ago was located in the U/frzi gallery in the
city’s very centre, contains one of the greatest archival collections of mate-
rials anywhere in the world. Its holdings for the history of Florence from
the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries are unrivalled, and it is hard to
imagine that the sort of question one can raise about the history of late
medieval (and renaissance) Florence could be seriously asked for the histo-
ry of any other European city or state. More than one historian of Florence
has singlemindedly pursued the chimera of getting to the bottom of a par-
ticularly interesting and complex question by following an ever deepening
trail of paper (or parchment) through the Archivzo’s labyrinthine documen-
tary holdings. The specificity and concreteness of the results (even if seldom
these offered the precise answer to the specific question initially posed)
seemed to provide sufficient compensation for those stung by the bug of
archival digging. This book’s last chapter, written on the occasion of the old
Archivio’s relocation to its new, ultra modern home in the Piazza Beccaria
bespeaks at once the affection nurtured by many of us for our beloved
research location, and the suspicion (which, in retrospect, proved largely
unjustified) that the closing of the old Archivio di Stato would result in a
major interruption of our studies.
It took me years to move beyond this localist perspective, to begin to
place Florence and the Italian city-states in a set of different and broader
contexts. An article published in 1977, but not included in this volume, on
the iconography of the Brancacci Chapel, led me to consider the history of
Florence in the context of the great debates at the turn of the fifteenth cen-
tury about the nature of the Roman Church at the time of the Schism and
the Conciliar movement. Two other studies (a comparison of the history of
the Italian communes and of the Greek poleis; and a comparative history of
Florentine, Genoese, and Venetian fiscal histories), published below as
chapters 1 and 4, were attempts to tease out of such comparisons the speci-
ficity and particularity of historical phenomena that long interested me. To
be sure, this is not the occasion for a disquisition on the advantages offered
and pitfalls incurred by historical comparisons. Suffice it for me to say that
the challenge of comparative history is often difficult to meet, especially
when one insists on reconstructing with as great a degree of specificity and
concreteness, and on the basis of available archival evidence, the institu-
tional and cultural contexts which frame the phenomena being compared.
But, as I have learned over the years, and as is suggested by Francesco
Guicciardini’s graphic aphorism with which I close this book” first chapter,
it is precisely such often frustrating comparative exercises that enable one
to pose increasingly refined questions about the specific historical phe-
nomena one wishes to understand.
INTRODUCTION 5
In my dissertation, drawing mostly on legislative records (Provvisioni,

Deliberazioni dei Signori, and Balie), as well as on the electoral records
(Iratte) for the staffing of various magistracies, I attempted to draw a col-
lective picture of the city’s ruling class in the two or so decades following
the restoration of the regime of the artigiani maggiori in 1382. The problem
that, in the end, appeared to me important was the comparison of two
images that, in the early and mid-1960s, were prevalent in the then available
historiography. On the one hand, there was the image of an aristocratic
restoration that one finds in the literature from Machiavelli’s Storie fioren-
tine (especially in the opening passages of Book III), through the important
historians of the sixteenth century (above all Guicciardini, but also Nardi,
Nerli, Bruto, Ammirato), down to the voluminous histories of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries written by Gino Capponi and F. T. Perrens.
In all these works, as well as the few monographic studies (by Niccolò
Rodolico, Antonio Rado, Francesco Pellegrini, and a few others) there pre-
vailed the image of an increasingly narrow aristocratic class that, after 1382,
dominated Florentine politics. On the other hand, Hans Baron and Euge-
nio Garin had powerfully argued that, during those very decades, in the
writings of thinkers such as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni and other
“civic humanists,” as well as in the more occasional literary output of lay
people such as Alamanno Rinuccini, and Gregorio (Goro) Dati one wit-
nesses the emergence of a civic and political ideology, which contempo-
raries systematically and insistently juxtaposed to the seigneurial regimes
then prevalent in many other Italian city-states. My question then was to try
to reconcile these two images. How could the emergence of an oligarchy —
increasingly in control of the city’s politics, increasingly intolerant of inter-
nal opposition, increasingly intent upon relying on extraordinary political
and electoral procedures to ensure its domination — be reconciled with the
forceful articulation of the ideology of wmanesimo civile?
This question was at the center of my thinking during my years as a doc-
toral student, and it was the focal point of three articles published in the
years 1967 and 1968, that are not included in this volume. My decision not
to republish them here is simple enough. In the course of nearly three years
of systematic explorations in the Archivio di Stato, and in other Florentine
libraries, I had gathered substantial amounts of information. The image of
Florence’s ruling class during the Albizzian period that was slowly devel-
oping in my mind suggested that the established historiographic view about
late fourteenth century politics was in need of some revision. On the one
hand, the increasing use of extraordinary commissions (balie) for the con-
duct of war and for the elaboration of a fiscal policy confirmed the view
that those decades witnessed the affirmation of a new type of regime, whose
members were drawn from a restricted number of prominent families, and
whose collectivity might be referred to as an oligarchy. I suggested this

point in an article published in the 1968 issue of Speculum, also arguing
there that one of the characteristics of late Trecento politics was the increas-
ingly acute tension between Florentine republican institutions and political
traditions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the centripetal tendencies
evident in the increasing reliance on bale. In another article that also
appeared in the same year in the Nuova rivista storica I presented the results
of an analysis, based on the records of the Trazte, that seemed to point to a
different conclusion. Indeed, these records showed that during the very
years when extraordinary commissions were increasingly used to cope with
major military and fiscal crises the Florentine electoral body was very sub-
stantially increased. A larger number of men, drawn from an ever larger
number of families, had their names inserted in the electoral bags from
which members of Florence’s principal magistracies were drawn. Signifi-
cantly, these were also the years when the ideology of civic humanism was
most forcefully and eloquently expressed by Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo
Bruni, and several other humanists and laymen.
The significance of these findings did not become clear to me until some
years later, following the publication of major studies by Gene Brucker and,
perhaps more to the point, by John Najemy. Later still, David Herlihy, in a
study sadly left incomplete by his premature death, returned to these data,
setting them in an even broader demographic and social context. Only then
did it become evident that, rather than representing contradictory trends,
the three phenomena that I was struggling to relate — use of extraordinary
political commissions, an increase in the size of the electoral base, and the
articulation of the new, civically and politically engaged ideology — were not
at all contradictory, but rather complemented each other. In 1382, with the
fall of the regime that had been established three years earlier, a sort of oli-
garchy, which, as Dale Kent was later to suggest, it would be more appro-
priate to refer to as the reggzmento, did begin to emerge in Florence, suc-
ceeding, over the next decade, especially as a result of a series of coups de
main in 1385, 1393, and 1400, to consolidate its power. Concurrently, and
as a result of a phenomenon that was not analyzed until the publication in
1978 of David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch’s pioneering study of the
1427 Catasto, economic resources in Florentine society became strikingly
polarized, with a small fragment of society controlling a very substantial
fraction of that society’s total wealth. Evidently, this process of polarization
was not limited to the distribution of wealth, but also extended to the polit-
ical arena, as well. The polarization of the political class had as a conse-
quence the temporary expansion of the pool of eligible office holders, as a
certain number of middling families were absorbed in the reggimento, while
many more fell by the political way side. The reggimento thus was tem-
INTRODUCTION 7l
porarily enlarged, while, from its very core, there emerged the city’s domi-
nant political leadership, comprising a few dozen families. It was precisely,
Or so it seems to me in retrospect, during this complex process of political
polarization and the emergence of a dominant political elite that Salutati
and Bruni fashioned their ideas, forging a hortatory ideology that members
of this newly emerged dominant class would find at once suitable to their
new privileges and responsibilities and congenial to their leadership. Those
three articles that appeared in 1967 and 1968 merely adumbrated some of
these issues, which other scholars subsequently clarified more precisely and
sharply than I had been able to do. Hence, my decision to exclude them
from this volume.
In the process of trying to understand the nature of political power and
the manner in which it was articulated in fifteenth-century Florence, I dis-
covered the literature on political patronage, which anthropologists had
very profitably applied to the study of some contemporary (“traditional”)
societies. Other (mostly Anglophone) historians, such as Gene Brucker,
Dale Kent, Francis Kent, Ronald Weissman, Richard Trexler had also
began to explore the possible use of this concept for understanding the type
of personal relations that prevailed in late medieval societies, such as that of
Florence. For scholars whose reflection upon questions of political power
was initially inspired by their reading of Burckhard, Chabod, and Matting-
ly (not to speak of Max Weber and Friedrich Meinecke) use of the concept
of patronage entailed a considerable conceptual repositioning. The concept
of the state — centralized, impersonal, and bureaucratic — was at the very
core of the work of generations of historians for whom the “Burckhardtian
state of the Renaissance” represented the first, unmistakable evidence of
the modernity of the Renaissance itself. My own initial forays into the his-
tory of Florentine politics were very much inspired by this set of ideas. To
shift from these to the concept of patronage meant to adjust one’s thinking
to a different sort of image of the state — indeed, to question the utility of
this very notion.
Early on in my studies, while I was still in graduate school, I had dis-
covered two books that had much impressed me. I had discovered these
books in the seminar of Donald G. Barnes, a colleague of Becker’s, author
of two important works on 18'*-century English politics. Barnes first led me
to read Lewis Namier’s classic account on the structure of politics in Eng-
land in the reign of George III, and from Namier it was but a short con-
ceptual step (and only a few steps down the library aisle) to Ronald Syme’s
powerful history of the Roman revolution. For a very long time, these two
books influenced me more than I might perhaps care to acknowledge. If the
general questions that animated me at the time were borne in my mind as a
result of Marvin Becker’s guidance through the wealth of Florentine histo-
ce FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
riography, Namier and Syme pointed to an approach that I became increas-

ingly convinced would be useful in my own study. These questions had to
do with the formation of political parties, with an attempt to understand
the flow of political power (and the eventual articulation of a political ide-
ology) in terms of a prosopographical reconstruction of the ties of friend-
ship, of marriage alliance, of the give-and-take of political favours among
those individuals who were actively engaged in Florence’s political life. To
be sure, Namier and Syme had applied the concept (or approach) of proso-
pography in analyses of societies that differed greatly from that of Trecen-
to and Quattrocento Florence. They nonetheless offered a conceptual con-
text and an analytical vocabulary that were useful following my discovery of
anthropologists’s studies of patronage.
Two of this book’s chapters (chapters 2 and 3) comprise a paper I pre-
sented in a conference on political patronage held at the Historisches Kol-
leg in München and a second paper at the annual meeting of the American
Historical Association in 1986. For me, the issue was to connect, if such a
link were possible, the notion of the state to the exercise of political power
as this was manifest in the sort of personal exchange that the concept of
patronage helped to capture. I can’t say that such a connection has been
made entirely satisfactorily. Historians who have focused their attention
largely on ties of patronage, emphasizing the reciprocal obligations
incurred in such exchanges, have tended to miss out the importance of
institutional structures within which patrons and clients acted in the polit-
ical and social arenas. Nonetheless, it should also be said that it was thanks
to these historians that we have been able to capture a texture of the Flo-
rentine state that, previously, had gone largely unnoticed. For historical
analyses with patronage at their core have brought to our attention what,
for lack of a better term, we might define as the non-modern nature of the
Florentine state: its fragmentariness, the absence from it of a hard centre,
and of a centralizing, bureaucratizing project. On the other hand, histori-
ans who have been intent on capturing the institutional changes in the poli-
ty’s administrative, judicial, and fiscal realms have tended to miss out the
personal dimension of political exchanges that the concept of patronage
might have enabled them to describe. With good reason, institutionalists
could be criticized for bringing to bear in their analyses a however implicit
teleological scheme, at the center of which was the concept of modernity.
For their part, students of political patronage could, often with good rea-
son, be accused of anachronism, of using analytical tools more appropriate
to societies that were very different from that of fifteenth-century Florence.
It always struck me that both approaches had something very useful to
contribute to our understanding of Florentine society, and my (however
unsuccessful) effort in my own analyses has been to appropriate elements
INTRODUCTION 9
of both. Chapter 8, below, represents such an effort: an attempt to capture,

at once, the centrifugal and centripetal dimensions of Florentine political
history, to identify moments of centralization that followed (or were pre-
ceded by) moments of greater fragmentation. It seemed to me that one way
to try to hold in balance both approaches was to move away from a teleo-
logical conviction that modernity proceeded in a linear, and retrospective-
ly, predictable direction. Rather, I suggested in this paper that a more com-
plex sense of time, with centralizing and decentralizing tendencies follow-
ing each other depending on political and other circumstances. In short,
what I argue in this chapter is that an effort to apply a rigorous and imper-
sonal fiscal system (surely, one of the cardinal characteristics imputed to the
modern state) needs to be understood within the context of prevalent polit-
ical circumstances. A change in this political context might well resultin a
different fiscal policy, which, from our own teleological perspective might
appear to be a step Basata My evidence for the claim I presented in this
paper came from the history of Florence in the first half of the fifteenth cen-
tury. A disciplining, centralizing, rigorist set of fiscal policies (but also evi-
dent in other realms of political life) implemented in the first two or so
decades of the century, was rather sharply reversed following 1434, with
establishment of the Medici as primi inter pares, among the city’s political
elite. The explanation for this change, I argued, was the new political envi-
ronment created by Cosimo’s return from exile. The heated debate that fol-
lowed my presentation in Chicago rather forcefully suggested to me that the
point did not prove especially convincing to many of those in attendance.
But, after thinking about their comments and reading the many review arti-
cles about the Chicago meeting, I confess to not having changed my mind.
To be sure, were I to re-write the chapter, I would have expressed myself
somewhat more circumspectly, and perhaps slightly changed some minor
points. But on the major one I am willing to put it forth publically once
again, in the conviction that while retrospective anachronisms are, surely, to
be avoided, a close look at fifteenth-century Florentine politics and politi-
cal institutions reveals at once elements of what we might characterize as
the modern state coexisting with elements that we usually attach to pre-
modern or non-modern societies. In short, trends that went in the direction
of a centralizing and impersonal form of governance appear evident along-
side those that pointed to an intensely personal form of managing power.
Chapter 3, below, written in the 1970s, was an effort to describe, as
graphically as the personal correspondence of Cosimo de’ Medici might
allow one to do, the ways in which a great, and immensely successful polit-
ical leader dominated his city’s life in the second third of the fifteenth cen-
tury. Cosimo’s correspondence, although not unique for Quattrocento Flo-
rence, provides unusually rich insight into the ties of patronage that he cul-
tivated, and that others sought to strike with him. Studies of the sort have
become more numerous in recent years, and some of them, as for example
those of Dale Kent, Francis Kent, and Melissa Bullard, as well as, of course,
the extraordinarily impressive multi-volume edition of the correspondence
of Lorenzo il Magnifico, have enabled us to capture the texture of Floren-
tine society and political culture as few documents could. If I am not mis-
taken, my study of Cosimo” political patronage was among the very first to
have adopted this approach, and to have brought to bear on an analysis of
Florentine politics the conceptual vocabulary of patronage studies. Perhaps
overtaken by my enthusiasm for the analytical possibilities offered by stud-
ies of patronage, perhaps also anxious to impress those in attendance with
the novelty of this approach, I used, in the article’s title and in the text, a
term whose ordinary use one finds in altogether different types of dis-
course. I referred to Cosimo as a padrino, a mafia-like political boss. At least
one senior scholar in attendance when I first made my presentation sternly
scolded me for what he took to be a cheap use of a rhetorical device with
no place in a scholarly analysis. Since then, I have often wondered if this
criticism was fair, but have concluded that, for all its evident drawbacks, it
did capture a quality of mid-Quattrocento political life that before the
1970s had largely gone unnoticed. What’s more, to refer to Cosimo as a
padrino, and not by the official title of Pater Patriae he was posthumously
granted, was to somewhat desacralize a figure that had often treated with an
excess of respect, not only by his contemporaries, but by a number of histo-
rians, as well. For this reason, I have chosen to retain its use in this book.
Soon after beginning my studies of Florentine politics, I became aware
of the existence of a problem that, increasingly, occupied a central place in
my thinking. Becker himself had written a series of powerful and influen-
tial studies on the history of Florentine public finance, concentrating most-
ly on the 14th century. In his characteristically brilliant and highly original
approach, he had also suggested the key role that the city’s public debt had
played in the formation of Florentine public ethos. I turned my attention to
the history of the Monte shortly after completing my dissertation, and, over
the following years, I turned, repeatedly, to the enormously complex and
fascinating problems raised by its administration. My first book, published
in 1971, Florentine Public Finance in the Early Renaissance, 1400-1433, had
been based on the records of the Camera del Comune, a magistracy dating
from the early 14th century, that, over time, had become the central agent
in the administration of public finances. In his various studies, Becker had
referred to the records of the Monte, but, because of the poor state of their
organization, and their immensity (numbering as they did more than 3.400
registers from the mid-14th to the mid-16th centuries), neither he, nor any-
one else had been granted access to them. Despite their inaccessibility while
INTRODUCTION 11
I was writing my book on public finance, I had been able to formulate a

working hypothesis on the links between political life and fiscal policy. In
short, I argued that the Medici success in defeating their political enemies
could to a fairly large extent be accounted for by their enormous econom-
ic power, and their ability, at a time of acute military and fiscal crisis in the
late 1420s, to advance huge short-term, high-interest loans to the govern-
ment.
The completion of my book resulted in an unexpected turn of events,
which marked my professional career for the following twenty years. To my
great pleasure, Guido Pampaloni, then Director of the Archivio di Stato,
and later to become a close friend, asked me to prepare the first draft of an
inventory of the enormous collection of the Monte archive. The chance to
be the first to have access to such a treasure of archival materials, never
before used by any scholar, was too strong to resist. I spent fifteen months,
from June 1971 to August 1972 systematically going through this collection,
examining, however briefly, every one of the 3.474 documents, and prepar-
ing a brief descriptive statement for each. Copies of the two small note-
books that contain my notes were soon thereafter placed in the Archzvio’s
Sala degli Inventari and have been used by scholars interested in the enor-
mously varied information contained in these records. Not surprisingly, fol-
lowing the completion of this summary inventory, I spent many years min-
ing some of these records’s contents, investigating, initially, questions
regarding the administration of the public debt, and, with the passage of
time, enlarging my field of inquiry to encompass broader, and often com-
parative questions of political economy.
This book’s central chapters (chapters 4 through 9) deal with a series of
questions related to the public debt’s administration in the fifteenth centu-
ry. Point of departure of this work is Francesco Guicciardini’s aphoristic
apercu, that had been cited by Marvin Becker in one of his very early stud-
ies: O al monte disfara Firenze, o Firenze disfarà il Monte. In short, from the
very start, I was driven by the conviction, repeatedly reinforced in the
course of subsequent specific research projects, that the Monte was not
simply a fiscal instrument, managed by a very influential fiscal magistracy.
By the early decades of the 15th century, it had become the hinge of the
city’s public finances, with all (or, if not absolutely all, the overwhelming
proportion) of public incomes and expenditures funnelled through its
offices. It was also an institution that had gathered within its orbit nearly
the totality of the city’s propertied classes, as well as ecclesiastical and other
charitable institutions. Private individuals had substantial portions of their
patrimonies invested in the Monte, occasionally engaged in speculative
trading of Monte credits, even used these credits to pay off debts with pri-
vate individuals or the government. As a result, its records shed light on the
patrimonial strategies of families, and, quite amazingly, on its matrimonial

ones, as well. Without exaggeration, over time it had become, as a legisla-
tive decree of the mid-15th century stated, z/ cuore di questa città (this city’s
very heart). To be sure, considerations regarding its management occupied
a good deal of my attention. Chapter 6 in this volume, and chapter 2 of my
book, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (1994), deal with admin-
istrative questions regarding the public debt. But these questions far from
exhaust the range of issues one could usefully raise when dealing with the
records of this institution, that, in a tentacular fashion, had invaded all man-
ifestations of Florentine life, making it difficult to draw a clear line of sep-
aration between the realm of the private and that of the public.
In my book noted in the preceding paragraph, and in this work’s second
volume, I address a number of issues that emerge from the study of the
Monte but that do not strictly deal directly with fiscal matters. Especially
important, in this regard, was the Monte delle doti, that was established in
1425 and continued functioning until well into the 16th century, which
paid, at the time of their marriage, often substantial portions of dowries to
thousands of girls in the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries. The arti-
cles on the Monte included in this volume deal more strictly with fiscal mat-
ters. Chapter 5 addresses an issue that has generated a certain amount of
controversy among historians of Florence. Nearly fifty years ago, Louis
Marks had suggested that the Monte represented the interests of a tiny
minority of well-to-do Florentines, those whom he defined as the city’s
“financial oligarchy.” In their capital work on the Catasto of 1427, Herlihy
and Klapisch demonstrated that Monte credits were much more unevenly
distributed among the city’s residents than any other form of wealth (real
property and business investments). Indeed, a very small fraction of the
population controlled an overwhelming amount of investments in the
Monte. My own analysis of investment patterns in the Monte at the time of
its consolidation in the 1340s reveals a somewhat different picture: a very
wide diffusion of Monte credits, but, also, the first evident signs of a trend
toward their concentration in the hands of speculators and investors. But
the issue of the Monte’s social history requires additional and systematic
investigation, dealing as it does not simply with ownership, but also with
use of Monte credits, and with their availability as a sort of surrogate cash
with which the liquidity of the Florentine economy was enhanced.
For its part, chapter 7 deals with the opposite issue. Given the fact that
by the late 1470s, the Medici primacy in the city was uncontested, and that
Lorenzo il Magnifico enjoyed considerably greater freedom in managing
Florence’s affairs than any other person before him, was it possible for the
Monte to be manipulated in a patently self-serving way? In other words,
was it possible for Lorenzo to draw on the Monte’s public resources to
INTRODUCTION 13
advance his own, private interests? Allegations about gross improprieties in

the management of Monte funds had been made since the fall of the first
Medici regime in 1494. They were repeated over the years by other histori-
ans, among whom, most recently, both Raymond de Roover, the great his-
torian of the Medici bank, and Alison Brown, a distinguished student of
Florentine political theory. Their interpretations rather intrigued me, for
they seemed to present, from a different angle and on the basis of new evi-
dence, the question to which I referred above: the nature of the Florentine
state in the fifteenth century. In other words, was the nature of the Floren-
tine government institutions such as to be open to manipulation by a per-
son who, for all his auctoritas did not hold an official position? Together
with Professor Giovanni Ciappelli, who had been a student of mine and
who, over the years, had himself contributed significantly to our under-
standing of Florentine fiscal history, we set out to investigate the question.
How, exactly, had it been süggested did Lorenzo intervene in the affairs of
the Monte? How, by extension, did the Monte itself — by which we mean,
its governors, accountants and scribes — go about their work? Was it possi-
ble for them to conceal payments, transfers of Monte credits, or payment of
interest on them, so as to protect the allegedly illicit transfers of money to
Lorenzo? Following a detective-like search, the image that appeared to us
proved to be more banal, and, perhaps more predictable, than some of our
colleagues might have suspected. Of course, Lorenzo did enjoy unrivalled
power in Florence. But his power was far from unlimited. Special conces-
sions that he was granted were, in fact, approved, not ad personam but in
the nature of general laws, by the regular decision-making bodies in the city.
The Florentine government — we might even call it the Florentine state —
was pliable, it often ceded to the interests of groups or individuals, in
moments of its history it could hardly be distinguished from these private
interests. Nonetheless, its structures, its formal procedures, its laws could
not be manipulated at will; they had to be respected even by the most pow-
erful and influential citizens of Florence. Even in the realm of the Medici
dealings with the Monte one cannot but note a tension — to which I made
a reference above — between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in the
administration and operations of government.
The book’s penultimate chapter (no. 9) deals with the intellectual tra-
jectory of Elio Conti, the historian who, until his sadly premature death,
had done more than anyone else, with the possible exception of Marvin
Becker, to enhance our understanding of fifteenth-century Florentine pub-
lic finance. His was an interesting and tormented intellectual life, which led
him from his initial flirting with the possibility of adopting a however soft
materialist key to interpreting the past — in his case, fifteenth-century Flo-
rentine society — to a radically skeptical stance about the possibility of for-
mulating strong generalizations about the past. Conti’s strong nominalist

convictions — that the archival documents themselves, when properly deci-
phered and understood provide adequate historical understanding — led
him to launch two massive archival campaigns: on the history of land hold-
ing in Florentine dominated Tuscany, and on Florence” fiscal history. Each
of these campaigns led to the publication of a series of volumes, very heav-
ily weighed toward the presentation and statistical elaboration of archival
data, and very short in advancing strong interpretations. For a historian,
Elio Conti’s experience contains a cautionary tale about the traps contained
in self-referential archival research projects. On the other hand, for a histo-
rian of Florentine public finance, Conti’s two volumes devoted to the sub-
ject are mines of useful information. The decision to include my essay on
Conti in this volume bespeaks at once my conviction that his life’s work
contains an edifying lesson of scholarly dedication and of nearly tragic epis-
temological short-sightedness, and my view that, when all is said and done,
no student of Florentine fiscal history can get far in his work without refer-
ring to Conti’s two volumes on the subject.
Inevitably as one re-reads articles written as long as 30 years ago, one is

reminded not only of their imperfections, but also of how much, over many
decades, friends have been vital to one’s work. Many of the friends who,
either directly in the course of conversations, or indirectly through their pub-
lications, have helped me during the past many years will find their names in
the preceding pages. I should like to close this Introduction by thanking four
other scholars — all specialists in Florentine history — whose work I have not
cited above, but whose friendship and conversation have greatly enriched my
life. I mention Lauro Martines first, because I met him from the very start of
my archival experience in Florence; were it not for his patience and generosi-
ty in my first months in the Archivio di Stato, I might well have not contin-
ued in the field. Julius Kirshner, Richard Trexler, and Franek Sznura, in addi-
tion to being distinguished scholars, have been great friends. Serena Ferente
has discharged the responsibilities of research assistant more diligently, and
intelligently than any scholar might ever wish. I warmly thank her for her
help. Niki Koniordos, assistant extraordinaire, has handled many of the prac-
tical problems of this, as of many other projects. I thank her warmly. And, last
but certainly not least, my warm thanks go to Federico Codignola and to
Lodovico Steidl, for their willingness to accept in their most prestigious col-
lana these collected essays.
le
POLIS/COMUNE: REFLECTIONS ON A COMPARISON
This volume’s opening essay reproduces the concluding reflections pre-

sented before the last session of a Symposium held in 1989, whose object was
to undertake a systematic comparison between city-states in antiquity and in
medieval Italy. The Symposium’s last session was devoted to “Territory, Exter-
nal Relations and Empire,” with papers by Kurt Raaflaub on antiquity, and
by Giorgio Chittolini and James S. Grubb on the Middle Ages. The entire dis-
cussion’s comparative tone was set by Wilfried Nippel’s brilliant opening
address, on ”Max Weber’s ‘The City’ Revisited.” The advantages of such a
comparative approach were repeatedly made evident in the course of our dis-
cusstons and are clearly presented in the pages of a weighty volume that repro-
duced the Symposium's proceedings. By the Symposium’s last day, when the
paper that follows was presented to the distinguished audience, it seemed
appropriate to end on a somewhat skeptical and cautious tone. By doing so,
there is quite evidently no desire to doubt the gains in our understanding that
comparative history (a subject much more in vogue today than it was then),
but, rather, to be, as Francesco Guicciardini muses in my closing remark,
below, appropriately cautious and measured in whatever approach or method
one uses when studying the past.
On the face of it, the three topics of territory, foreign relations, and
empire comprise one unit, a tripartite pendant to two other sections of this
book, that on citizens and political classes and the other on politics and
conflicts. Undeniably, these two parts deal with questions inherent to the
internal, or domestic, politics of city-states. In our case, the very joining of
the category “territory” to “foreign relations” and “empire” suggests that
what concerns us is not the internal histories of these polities but their rela-
tionships with entities external to themselves. We have little difficulty
understanding what we mean by the expression foreign relations: the pacif-
ic or bellicose dealings between autonomous and juridically equal political
entities. Diplomatic negotiations, mediation of disputes, ambassadorial
missions, treaties, international law, and, of course, war: these are the ingre-
dients of this topic, each offering links between the seemingly well circum-
scribed internal political world of a state and the complex and often unpre-
dictable political realities that are external to it. On the face of it, empire
presents a comparable analytical category. The fifth variant contained in the
Oxford Shorter English Dictionary is probably the simplest and most clear-
cut definition relevant to our purposes: “An extensive territory (esp. an
aggregate of many states) ruled over by an emperor or by a sovereign state.”
This definition conveys the same set of images that the term foreign rela-
tions does: a government (the sovereign state referred to in the dictionary)
dealing with the outside world, not in terms of juridical parity, but rather in
a hierarchical relationship between a juridically and politically superior
government and a series of subordinate governments that, either willingly
or by comparison, have acknowledged their status as inferiors.
In this internal/external antinomy, where does the category of territory
fit? In domestic or in foreign affairs? Here, the earlier symmetrical distinc-
tion between categories internal to the state itself and those outside
becomes blurred. Territory encompasses realms that are both internal and
external to the state itself. Indeed, definitions la and 1b of the term /errz-
tory in the Oxford Shorter Dictionary, underscore this ambivalence: la: “The
land or district lying around a city or town and under its jurisdiction.” 1b:
“The land or country belonging to or under the dominion of a ruler or
state.” The second definition points in the direction of external relations,
suggesting almost an equivalence between territory and empire. The first,
by underlying the contiguous nature of the city and of its territory, suggests
much closer links between the two, even their interpenetration. This same
ambiguity seems to be underscored in the definition of the term /errétorium
contained in the Digest:
Territorium est universitas agrorum infra confines cuiusque civitatis.\
It is understandable, perhaps, if a student of medieval Italian history

thinks of the topics contained in the title of this section by casting his
thoughts upon the antinomy internal/external politics. The distinction,
especially in juridical terms, between the city and the territory which sur-
rounds it — the wrbs and its contado — is fundamental to the histories of
medieval city-states. Political, judicial, and institutional history; the rights of
citizenship; fiscal relations between the hegemonic central authority and
the subordinate, once independent powers in the periphery of the state;
economic and monetary policies; and many more hinge on the distinction
' Grohmann (1981), II, 638.

1. POLIS/COMUNE: REFLECTIONS ON A COMPARISON 197
between the città and the contado. Their very physical appearance — walls
and fortifications that surrounded them and gates through which, at pre-
scribed times and only by the consent of those who governed each city, out-
siders could enter the urban space — at once defined these cities topo-
graphically and delimited them in space, underscoring in the process the
separation of each città from its surroundings.
In reality, the juridical distinctions fashioned by the time of the early fif-
teenth century were even more precise. In Tuscany, for example, by the
1420s, one distinguished the city not only from its surrounding territory (its
contado), but also from the distretto, subject cities each of which, normally,
maintained control over its own contado. Thus, Florence had its contado,
comprising vast tracts of rural areas and some towns, such as Prato and San
Gimignano, which it subjected to a particular fiscal and judicial regime.
Larger towns, among them Pistoia, Arezzo, and Pisa, were incorporated
into the Florentine distretto, with each, at least during the initial stages of
their incorporation into the Florentine domain, allowed to administer its
own contado, while concurrently conferring upon its own citizens local
political and fiscal privileges. A few areas, generally mountaintop castra and
hamlets in the borderlands between Tuscany and the Romagna, mostly in
the area of the Casentino, enjoyed a particular status, which, in a sense,
acknowledged the resilience of the power and the geographic isolation of
the local feudal lords, brought rather late, and under terms more favorable
to themselves, within the realm of Florentine jurisdiction. But these were
exceptions, and by the fourteenth century, the overwhelming majority of
people living outside the city of Florence but in the Florentine dominium
were classified as being either contadini or distrettuali. Throughout the
period that interests us (the thirteenth through the middle of the sixteenth
centuries, residents of the contado and citizens of subject cities could obtain
Florentine citizenship and all the perquisites attached to that status only
with great difficulty and under unusual circumstances.” When dealing with
the history of the relations between the dominant city of Florence and the
vast tracts of Tuscany that had been brought under its control, the antino-
my with which I began seems fitting.
The Florentine institutional organization of the Tuscan territory and of
the region’s urban centers incorporated in its realm was not necessarily typ-
ical of that prevalent in other Italian regions. Yet, the same general pattern
is evident elsewhere: a legal separation between central, or dominant, city
and one or more administrative categories of its lands and possessions. In
Genoa, the distinction was between the city, lands subjected to the avaria,
2 Kirshner (1971).
and those which continued to be governed, even into the sixteenth centu-
ry, by feudal grants. In Siena, there was a difference between the contado
and the erre acquistate. In Padua, before its inclusion into the Venetian
state, nearly all of the subject lands and towns were incorporated into the
Paduan contado, although some subject communes such as Monselice, Este,
and Montagnana were allowed to exercise a greater degree of autonomy. In
Venice, the Serenissima had constructed a mosaic of jurisdictions and mag-
istracies through which to govern its territories, at the center of which was
the arbitrium of Venice itself, a situation that led a recent historian to com-
ment upon the incapacità congenita of the Venetian ruling class to assimilate
within its ranks the local, provincial patriciates of the subject cities.’
The point I am trying to make is simple: nearly always a key dimension
of the territorial policies pursued by late medieval Italian city-states was the
distinction between internal and external. But this distinction did not refer
to institutions internal or external to the polity itself, at least by the stan-
dards by which we define the internal and external realms of a state’s
actions. The territory, whether the corzado or the distretto of an Italian city-
state, was considered an integral part of its zperium. Its administration
was an internal matter. And, as is shown by the example of Florence in the
years after 1494, when Pisa regained its independence for a brief fifteen
years, the integrity of the zzpertum would be defended at great cost. Yet,
within the confines of the city-state, there prevailed a very clear sense of a
distinction between what properly was internal (that which concerned the
dominant city itself) and what was external (what concerned the territory
but not the wrbs, or the cità). The labels attached to Florentine magistra-
cies represent a particularly convincing illustration of this point. Offices
requiring service inside the city itself were called z#rinsici, while those tak-
ing their holders outside the city, but within the boundaries of the city-state,
were called esérinsicr.
The city, whether a large one that became the capital of an important ter-
ritorial state — Florence, Venice, Milan — or a smaller one such as Vicenza
under Venetian control in the fifteenth century, or Arezzo following 1384
under the control of Florence, systematically cultivated and defended its
juridical and political supremacy and distinctiveness from those lands
which comprised its territory. This legal separation — bearing primarily on
rights of citizenship and on fiscal responsibilities — was an integral, a defin-
ing, characteristic of the late medieval Italian city-states. I maintain that this
point retains its validity however one settles the much discussed question of
the alleged exploitative or symbiotic relationship between city and coun-
? Heers (1961), 590-600, and table 682-3; Bowsky (1981), 6-9; Hyde (1966), 46-49;
Grubb (1988); Mazzacane (n. d.), 582.
tryside. Even Enrico Fiumi, the most ardent proponent of a symbiotic rela-
tionship, never suggested that residents of the countryside were given rights
of citizenship or extended fiscal parity with inhabitants of the dominant
cities. It is no accident that in the events that followed Charles VIII’ inva-
sion of Italy in 1494 many cities, once-independent cvitates but later sub-
jected to the dominium of their more powerful neighbors, revolted,
reclaiming their ancient liberties. In Padua they did so, because, according
to the Paduan ambassador to the German emperor, they had been subject-
ed to “3,000 tyranni veneti.”* And in Pisa, Burgundio Leoli, speaking
before the French king in 1495, complained not simply and generically of
the “crudeltà e avarizia” of the Florentines, but also of Pisans not having
been “ammessi a qualità alcuna d’uffici o d’amministrazioni nel dominio
fiorentino.”? i
The situation in the ancient world strikes me as very different. I do not,
of course, wish to suggest that exploitation by powerful city-states of their
weaker neighbors did not take place; it may even have been common. The
Spartans did not need lessons from the Florentines or the Venetians on how
to deal with the Messenians. The latter, had they ever had a chance, would
easily have out-complained both Paduans and Pisans in their recitation of
the wrongs suffered under the tyranny of their neighbors who now had
become their masters. And the members of the Delian League would have
had a complaint or two about the manner in which their presumed allies
(their syrzzzacho:) had come to treat them unfairly and even to exploit
them. The point, rather, is another one. The very nature of the ancient city
was different from that of the medieval one. It was inherent in the charac-
ter of these ancient political entities to maintain relationships with the ter-
ritories surrounding them vastly different from those cultivated by their
medieval counterparts. In his chapter, Kurt Raaflaub has echoed the point
Moses Finley most recently made, namely “the closely interlocked town-
country unit” typical of most city-states. Finley himself, obviously drawn to
powerful insights formulated by Max Weber, was perhaps even more
emphatic. “Plato and Aristotle... took city and hinterland, town and coun-
try, together as a unit, not as distinct variables in competition or conflict.”
This was one of the most important elements of the ancient city that, Fin-
ley thought, entitled him to conclude that “the ancient city is a distinct and
distinguishable category.”°
4 Ventura (1979), I, 178-9.

> Mallett (1968) 404, n. 1.
6 Finley (1977), quotations on 307, 309. Finley was not particularly kind to historians
who did nor understand this basic fact. A scholar who, as recently as 1975, observed that the
Athenian polis was “a large... political unit — a state” in which Athens was only one of many
Since the Middle Ages, we have become accustomed to separating and

juxtaposing the categories urban and rural, ascribing to each a distinct
sphere of political action and social organization. The territorial organiza-
tion in antiquity undermines this perception. Why this was so — what his-
torical explanations one can adduce to account for this phenomenon - is a
question that need not detain us. The current scholarly consensus ascribes
this defining characteristic to the very origin of the polis, more particularly
to the relationships between what we would call the warrior and the polit-
ical classes. Whatever the origins of this phenomenon, the fact remains that
even a large polis such as Athens (more than 2,500 square kilometres with
as many as 40,000 citizens) comprised a citizen population the majority of
whom not only were landowners, but, more significantly, were residents of
the countryside. The polis of Athens was not simply the city of Athens with
an appendage of the countryside of Attica. Rather, the polis was the entire-
ty of Attica itself. And Athens was not, as we might be inclined to conceive
of it today, the dominant element of its city-state, as Florence dominated its
contado and distretto. Athens and Attica formed an integral part of the very
same polis. The same observation, it seems, was applicable not only to the
vast majority of the Greek poleis, but even to Rome, at least during its
republican and early imperial stages. In the context of Roman history, the
term civitas carried very much the same range of significances that the word
polis carried in Greek. If we momentarily return to the medieval city-states,
we cannot fail but be struck by the degree to which in antiquity rights of
citizenship and all the perquisites attached to that status were not extend-
ed on the basis of residence in urban or rural districts of what we, today,
would call the state.
The point of this digression is not necessarily to engage in systematic
comparisons of the territorial policies of ancient and medieval city-states.
Rather, my object is twofold: First, to establish the obvious point that the
tripartite topic defined in the title of this section leads us to consider a set
of questions absolutely central and internal to the histories of these city-
states, and not in the least either peripheral or external to them. An explo-
ration of the category “territory,” particularly when comparing ancient and
medieval city-states, underscores the key elements that distinguish the very
natures of these political organisms. The second point is perhaps less read-
ily acceptable, although I think that it flows directly from the first. Once the
fundamental differences between ancient and medieval city-states become
apparent — especially differences regarding the organization of territory and
members earned Finley’s stern rebuke, for this way of putting things “simply baffles me by
its incomprehension of ancient Greek institutions.” Finley (1983), 84, n. 38.
1. POLIS/COMUNE: REFLECTIONS ON A COMPARISON Di
the relationships of urban to rural regions — comparisons between these two

types of political organisms are exceedingly difficult. Without the utmost
care, such comparisons become misleading.
The trouble here, as on many other occasions, is the persistence of
words, which can often be misleading, precisely because they instill a sense
of false familiarity among historians who use them. This certainly appears
to be the case with that complex of words used in antiquity and in the Mid-
dle Ages to refer to politics and to the political process.
In Greece, the term polis, as Raaflaub reminds us, referred not so much
to a geographical locale, not certainly to a set of institutions, not even nec-
essarily to an urban formation. Rather, the key ingredient of a polis (as per
the well-known Aristotelian definition) was the existence of a community
of people, with its own laws and able to administer itself. The term also pos-
sessed a moral dimension, referring to the obligation of a citizen to share
the responsibilities imposed upon him by virtue of his membership in the
community comprising the polzs. In his funeral oration at the end of the first
year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles (as per Thucydides) used the terms
polis and politeia more than a dozen times. To an untrained philologist such
as myself, it seems that almost invariably the term evoked images of the
moral and political community comprising the Greek city-state. Pericles
himself was chosen by the polis to deliver the oration.’ Having praised the
ancestors and the fathers of the present generation for their excellence, he
then congratulated his contemporaries for having rendered the polis self-
dependent both in times of peace and of war.’ Or else, the term or its vari-
ants refer to what we might define as the constitution of the city-state, as
when Pericles praises the politeta with which Athens was able to reach its
greatness (2,36,4), or when he says that the Athenian polsteza did not copy
the laws of others (2,37,1).
It is difficult to make precise comparisons between the experiences of
the Greek city-states and those of Rome. Scholars acknowledge the awk-
wardness of applying labels taken from the Greek experience to the Roman
situation.” In his contribution to this volume, Timothy Cornell has shown
how profoundly Greek commentators such as Polybius and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus misunderstood (whether willfully or not is unclear to me) the
Roman experience and how they applied to the Roman polity the label of
the Greek polis. Yet, as he also shows, by the time of Livy and Tacitus,
despite the vast dimensions of the Roman Empire, and despite the anachro-
7 Thucydides (1900), 2, 34, 6.

8 Ibid., 2, 36, 3.
° Finley (1983), 11, n. 33.
nistic persistence of referring to the Roman Empire as a polis, the term they
used was not the Latin equivalent of polis; they referred not to the civitas
Romana, but rather to the urbs Romana.
If one looks to some texts of the Italian medieval period to determine
the rough equivalent of the Thucydidian terminology for referring to the
political process, one is struck by how the Roman imperial influence was
more pervasive than the Greek one; and how, furthermore, the terms Ital-
ian writers used, drawing on a stock of words and expressions with deep
roots in antiquity, nonetheless conveyed realities that were particular to the
experience of the Italian communes. A very small number of examples may
illustrate the point. Already in the middle of the twelfth century, Otto of
Freising made his famous remark that Italy was “tota inter civitates ferme
divisa.” It is clear from the sentence that immediately follows that what he
had in mind was urbes and not civitates in the Roman republican sense, for
he observes that so unusual was this habit that Italians insisted that their
bishops reside in their ccvztates and most of the nobles had taken residence
in their cities. Precisely the same point seems to be made by Remigio de’
Girolami in his De bono comuni early in the fourteenth century, when he
expressed himself in ways that an Athenian of Pericles’s generation would
most probably have had difficulty understanding. Remigio, in fact, suggest-
ed that if ever the city of Florence were destroyed, those who considered
themselves citizens of that city would no longer be entitled to that name:
“Qui erat civis florentinus per destructionem Florentie iam non est flo-
rentinus sed potius ‘flerentinus’. Et si non est civis non est homo, quia
homo est naturaliter animal civile secundum Philosophum.”!° Whether one
looks to Bonvesin de la Riva’s De Magnalibus Mediolani, to Dante’s own
poetical evocation of his city at his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida’s
time (Fiorenza dentro de la cerchia antica, Paradiso 15,97), to Bruni’s pane-
gyric to Florence (significantly entitled Laudatio Florentinae urbis, not Flo-
rentinae civitatis), or to any other number of fourteenth- or fifteenth-cen-
tury tracts, the inevitable conclusion one reaches is that medieval Italian
publicists and thinkers, however tenaciously they might have clung to
Greek and Roman terms, used these terms to describe political conditions
vastly different from those that had prevailed in fifth-century Athens and in
republican Rome.
This brief comparison of ancient and medieval city-states from the per-
spective of the relationship between city and territory reveals substantial
differences between the two. One type established an integrated political
and cultural relationship between urban centers and rural regions. The
19 Quoted in Rubinstein (1965), 55, n. 2.

other imposed a distinction between the two, creating, for its part, a rough
equivalence between two elements that the ancients themselves had tended
to separate: territory and empire. An examination of other aspects in the
administration of empires and in the conduct of foreign policies may well
reveal comparable differences, themselves by-products, as it were, of the
fundamentally different natures of ancient and medieval Italian city-states.
A brief examination of empire reinforces this point. What were the
causes underlying the acquisition of empires and what consequences did
empires have on the political structures of city-states? Our four states
could all be thought of as empire-builders. The case for Rome does not
require elaboration. At the other extreme was Florence, whose incorpora-
tion of such far-flung Tuscan cities as Cortona, Pisa, Talamone, Arezzo, and
Poppi into its dominium was tantamount to creating a regional empire.
Athens, for its part, transformed its system of alliances into an empire,
whose members, although ‘not always brought under direct domination of
the Athenian polzs, were reduced by the strength of the Athenian navy to
the status of subordinate client states. Of the four, Venice founded two
empires: a naval one in the Aegean Sea; and, once the viability of that
empire was threatened, a second, this one land-based, more akin to the
Florentine empire.
However different — it has often been thought of as unique — Rome”
empire seems to have had much more in common with that of Athens than
with that of Venice or Florence. In the cases of both ancient city-states, one
historian recently remarked upon the “extraordinary willingness of citizen
militias to be conscripted and to fight year after year” in support of their
city-states’ imperial policies. And the explanation he offered for “this
unceasing hunger for war and conquest” was the frequency with which
confiscated land in the newly acquired subject territories was used to settle
citizens of the metropolis in the colonies.!! Once again, it seems evident that
land — its shortage in the city-states and the importance assigned to it not
for economic reasons alone, but for political and cultural ones as well — was
a key element in the fashioning of imperial policies in antiquity.
By contrast, in medieval Italy, commercial and economic considerations
loomed much larger. Of course, empires in the Italian hinterland — in the
Veneto and in Tuscany — resulted in considerable investment in real prop-
erty by members of the Venetian and Florentine ruling classes. Some histo-
rians have even argued that investment to have been so substantial as to
have contributed directly to the loss of the economic élan and entrepre-
neurial spirit that had earlier characterized the cultures of Venice and Flo-
| Finley (1983), 113-115.

rence. Yet, it is a mistake to ascribe the acquisition of these empires to the

desire to appropriate and invest in land. That investment was an unintend-
ed consequence of a policy whose initial and overriding goal had been the
strengthening of the entrepreneurial and commercial bases of the Venetian
and Florentine economies. The Florentine case is well illustrated by the
conquest of Pisa, a step that led to the construction of a government-spon-
sored galley fleet, thought necessary for the strengthening of the economy.
And the Venetian conquest of the Terraferma was meant to ensure Venetian
commercial supremacy in that corner of Italy and to maintain the viability
of trade routes to transalpine markets.!
If the acquisition of empires was rooted in very different political and
cultural impulses, it also produced different consequences. To a medieval-
ist, Raaflaub’s point that the existence of its empire made possible the sur-
vival of the polis of Athens is striking. “Democracy and empire... were
closely linked together and depended on each other.” I take this statement
to mean that the more successful the Athenians were in their imperial
designs, the stronger and more successful they rendered their polis. The
consequences for Italian city-states were different. The old commune and
empire were hardly reconcilable to each other. Most obviously, this obser-
vation was true for cities such as Vicenza, Pisa, and many others that ceased
to exist as autonomous civitates following their incorporation into the
empires of Florence and Venice. But even these two became, as Chittolini
defines them, “dominant cities” and were greatly transformed as a conse-
quence. The old structures of government were adapted to accommodate
the demands of much larger states; the “gruppi dirigenti municipali”
became “ceti dirigenti di ambito non locale”; and, most important but also
perhaps ironic, the acquisition of regional empires resulted in the emer-
gence of new economic interests focused on landholding and the conse-
quent relative decline of the “commercial vocation” of both Florence and
Venice, that is, the slow transmutation of the very economic and political
essence of these two cities. By the middle of the fifteenth century, each had
become a very different type of civitas from what it had been two centuries
earlier. Grubb echoes precisely this conclusion: “However generous the
definition of city-state, however much constitutions preserved on paper sys-
tems of broadly based self-government, the Italian civitas was a shadow by
1450 and a memory by 1530.” The experience of ancient Rome would seem
? Mallett (1967). Luzzatto (1961), 161: “Se si può dunque ritenere che il movente prin-
cipale, almeno dal punto di vista economico, della politica di terraferma sia stato quello di
tutelare gli interessi vitali del commercio veneziano, non si può per questo disconoscere che
quella rapida conquista ha determinato una svolta decisiva nella storia di Venezia.”
to place it closer to that of Venice and Florence, for, undeniably, the civitas
of Rome was also greatly transformed as a consequence of the acquisition
of the empire.
These hypotheses about empire reinforce the picture that emerged in my
discussion on territory. When one looks closely, the striking element in a
comparison between ancient and medieval city-states is their divergences. I
do not refer here simply to differences in institutional structures, or in the
cadences of change over time, or what, in general, one could define as
superficial cultural elements. Rather, what I mean is that even where simi-
larities jump to the eye — and such similarities, surely, are not hard to find —
their cultural contexts endow them with very different meanings.
With this observation, I come to the last question of my discussion, the
alleged continuity between ancient and medieval city-states. To raise it is to
broach a controversy debated, often intensely, since the nineteenth century.
Savigny, Sismondi, Bücher, Meyer, Rostovtzeff, and many others have dis-
cussed this issue. In Italy, the debate between Mondolfo and Barbagallo on
the nature of work in the ancient and the medieval economies introduced
local variants to this discussion.! What is striking about these discussions is
the resilience of the notion that medieval cities, particularly in Italy, could be
thought of as temporal extensions or institutional continuators of ancient
city-states. Why has this view been so resilient? What elements have made it
possible for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, especially some very influential
medievalists, to insist on the continuity between antiquity and the Middle
Ages, even after Luzzatto’s criticism of Barbagallo, Biicher's attack on
Meyer, which in the words of Finley “left [Meyer’s] conclusions in tatters,”
and Lopez’s gentle warning that this problem of alleged continuity was
“male impostato”? Yet, Philip Jones, surely one of the most distinguished
historians of medieval Italy today, has recently returned to the thesis of con-
tinuity and, as Mario Nobili has shown, made it the conceptual pivot of his
interpretation of late medieval and early modern Italian history.”
In a series of magisterial publications, Jones has mounted a sustained
attack on what he has defined as the “myth of the bourgeoisie” in medieval
Italian communes.!* The starting point of his masterly treatment of
3 This discussion can be followed in Finley (1977) and in Cambiano (1988) chapter 4.
But cf. also the skeptical and wise observations of Lopez on the importance (or lack there-
of) of this question: Lopez (1984), 25.
14 Finley (1977), 316; Lopez (1984), 25.
5 Nobili (1980), 891-908.
16 Jones (1978), 187-372. There is some question about the degree to which Jones may
have somewhat changed (or refined) his earlier position. In Jones (1974), and in several of
medieval Italian history is this question: Why is it that Italy, first among
European economic powers in the fourteenth century, was last in the eigh-
teenth? Why were Italians unable to exploit their advanced position in the
late Middle Ages and why did they allow themselves to be overtaken by
their North European competitors?!” Seeking his answers in internal Italian
developments, and not in those changes that frequently attract the attention
of historians (the Italian invasions, transatlantic voyages, the rise of North
European nation states), Jones paints a picture of late medieval Italian
economy and culture different in fundamental respects from the widely
accepted view. To the claims that the dominant forces in medieval Italian
communes were the urban, entrepreneurial classes, Jones has juxtaposed
his conclusion that aristocratic and feudal structures remained prevalent in
late medieval Italian culture. Even in a “commercial Italy (Italia mercantile)
land prevailed over commerce, not only in society at large, but in the very
cities themselves.”!* In northern Europe, cities remained isolated from the
wider feudal world that surrounded them, discharging prevalently eco-
nomic functions. But in Italy cities became as much the locus of land-based,
feudal power as of commercial interests — and these latter had a chance to
prevail rarely and then only for very brief periods. The key question for our
inquiry is what, according to Jones, made possible the persistence and the
triumph of these feudal forces; why Italian society was not transformed
structurally at the time of the great economic changes that overcame it in
the late Middle Ages, and, furthermore, to what elements in its own histo-
ry and culture can one impute the economic backwardness of Italy in more
recent times.
Jones’s answer to these questions is at once clear and simple: It is the sur-
vival of the ancient civitas and the cultural traditions that went along with
it. “In the country where it began, the so-called ‘commercial revolution’ was
contained (or constrained) within an older, wider, diverse tradition: that of
the civitas, the polis, the Mediterranean city.”!° The comunità territoriale (or
else the comunione fra città e territorio), a condition that, in Jones’s view,
made the Italian comune comparable to ancient Rome, is key to the partic-
ular circumstances that prevailed in medieval Italy® The nobles, an ele-
ment of the “feudal” order, retained their power and influence because they
his earlier essays now collected in Jones (1980), he does not appear to have emphasized as
sharply as he did in his essay of 1978 his thesis on the “leggenda della borghesia.”
17 Jones (1978), 200.
Bones (1978) 252%
' Jones (1978), 195, 232.
20 Jones (1978), 195, 237.
were attracted to the cities, where they domesticated to their own cultural
standards the entrepreneurial penchants, that whole complex of phenome-
na of the Merkantilisierung which other historians consider the dominant
element of late medieval central and northern Italian society. Even at the
height of commercial development, and at the very moment when entre-
preneurial interests (that is, the borghesia) seemed to dominate the politics
of such city-states as Venice and Florence, it was really the landed, aristo-
cratic, feudal classes that set the tone of those urban cultures. The tradi-
tions of antiquity — a household — (ozRos) and land-based economy and the
values that derived from it — in the end, according to Jones, made Italian
cities different from the commercial emporiums of North European cities
and also accounted for the inability of these city-states to exploit their ini-
tial economic advantages and to slowly slide, following the fifteenth centu-
ry, into a condition of economic backwardness.?!
This is not the occasion‘to analyze this far-reaching view of Italian his-
tory. In 1974, Berengo had presented a very different vision of the Italian
cities in the late medieval and early modern eras.” For their parts, Nobili,
Mozzarelli, Angiolini, and others have made important contributions to a
critique of Jones’s interpretation. Here, I do not wish to dwell on these
issues. Instead, I would like to return to an earlier question: How can we
account for the resilience and persistence of the thesis of the alleged conti-
nuity between ancient and medieval city-states?
The answer, I think, is found in the very question that animates Jones’
scholarly enterprise. The question, you recall, is to locate in the internal
structures of Italian society the reasons for the economic backwardness that
became most evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a good
half a millennium following the events analyzed in Jones’s own essay. This
is to view Italian medieval history from the perspective of an especially long
longue durée, a durée made even longer when one considers that the locus
21 For a penetrating analysis of Jones’s ideas, for his indebtedness to the views of Otto
Brunner, and for the change in emphasis in Jones’s own assessment of the role of the late
medieval Italian entrepreneurial (bourgeois) classes, cf. Nobili (1980), to whom I am
indebted.
2 Marino Berengo (1974), particularly 668, 670.
3 Something more could still perhaps be said about Jones’s equation of the ancient polis
and the medieval civitas and about the difficulty of reconciling two ideas that Jones views as
complementary to each other, but that, when examined closely in the context of medieval
history, may generate doubts about their compatibility. I refer here to Jones’s notions, on the
one hand, of the alleged “comunione fra città e territorio” and, on the other, of the “potere...
pretese... e pregiudizi di città e cittadini.” These two phrases are taken from Jones (1978),
195 and 237.
DS FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
of Jones’s explanation for what happened in the early modern period is the
Greek polis and the Roman civitas. Medieval Italian history thus becomes
for Jones, just as it had for Max Weber himself, an ctermezzo, — a brief
moment squeezed at both ends by the prevalence of a feudal, land-based,
patrimonial society.24 In this scheme, the elements of that society which
merit close analysis, the characteristics that one must incorporate into one’s
interpretation, are precisely those which connect it, in a tightly organic
whole, with the centuries preceding and those following it. Dissonances in
this steady continuum are only apparent, drowned as they are by the cho-
rus of historical voices that carry one from the archaic economies of ancient
Greece and Rome to the backwardness of Italy at the time of Adam Smith
and Jeremy Bentham.
The examination of the past from the perspective of such longues durées
has, no doubt, important advantages. It also has disadvantages. One thinks
of the discussion regarding the origins of the modern state and of the sug-
gestive yet often anachronistic interpretations generated around this sub-
ject. These interpretations are now acknowledged as inadequate, for they
miss the mark of the characteristics of Italian city-states in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Few historians today would examine the political
history of these states from the perspective of the rise of the nation-state or
even of the supranational organisms that, in more recent times, have been
encroaching on the domain of the nation states. Recent interpretations
regarding the nature of the late medieval territorial state in Italy, by Beren-
go, Chittolini, Fasano, Grubb, and others, would have been inconceivable
at a time when the prevalent historical method was that of selecting indi-
vidual elements of the past, in light of their success at a future historical
moment, more proximate to our own. Under the welcome influence of
many ideas and theories, generated by such diverse thinkers as Malinows-
ki, Polanyi, and others, the teleological perspective has been broken and
the ties between past and present are seen as being more complex, more
indirect, more subject to sudden and brusque changes.
The same applies to the ties between ancient and medieval city-states. A
comparative examination of territory, foreign relations, and empire, under-
taken from the perspective of the very characteristics inherent to the Greek,
Roman, or medieval city-states, cannot help but underscore their differ-
ences, beyond all apparent but superficial similarities. In the end, it is those
particularities which make it possible to come closer to the defining char-
acteristics of cultures as diverse among themselves as Athens was from
For the notion of intermezzo storico in the thought of Max Weber, cf. Rossi (1987), 5-
28, esp. 15-16.
Rome and either Athens or Rome was from Venice or Florence. It might,
then, not be entirely inappropriate to conclude these observations with one
of Francesco Guicciardini’ ricordi (no. 110), intended no doubt as a friend-
ly criticism to one of the most inveterate and brilliant comparatists of all
time, Niccolò Machiavelli. The context of Guicciardini’ observations is
very different from our own, and, surely, the issues that divided him from
Machiavelli are far removed from the issues that might agitate a modern
scholarly community. Yet, it is possible that the thrust of his observations
may not be altogether irrelevant to the task at hand: “Quanto si ingannono
coloro che a ogni parola allegano e Romani! Bisognerebbe avere una città
condizionata come era loro, e poi governarsi secondo quello essemplo: el
quale a chi ha le qualità disproporzionate è tanto disproporzionato, quanto
sarebbe volere che uno asino facessi el corso di uno cavallo.””
I end here with Guicciardini’s acerbic reflection, to which, however, it
might not seem too irrevereft to add one additional thought. True enough,
it would be outrageous to expect a donkey to race like a horse. But perhaps
we come to know what, realistically, to expect of a horse and what of a don-
key only when we compare one with the other. Only then, to use Guicciar-
dini’s language, would we know the qualities that are proporzionate to each
and those that are disproporzionate.
2 Guicciardini (1951), 121.

e
174
2,
PATRONAGE AND THE STATE
IN EARLY MODERN ITALY
«Les clientèles ont existé à toutes les époques», writes Yves Durand in
the opening article of the Festschrift recently dedicated to Roland Mousnier,
one of the historians most directly responsible for underscoring the impor-
tance of clientage and of patronage in early modern European society.! In
Mousnier’s own vision, clientage has been a ubiquitous phenomenon; it,
and fidelity (/délité), the sentiment which underlies it, occupy such an
unmistakably central role as to merit the launching of an «enquéte interna-
tionale» whose object it would be to study their manifestations in as dis-
parate and diverse human relationships as the relation «Maître-Fidèle», «la
fidélité des époux», and even «la fidélité des croyants».? Such an ambitious
vision might take us in any number of different directions and may well run
the risk, as Giorgio Chittolini points out in his paper, of falling «nelle gener-
icita che talora si accompagnano ai discorsi sulle relazioni di patronato».’
Given this very real risk, you will not mind, I hope, if I begin my observa-
tions by focusing my attention, at least initially, on the narrow field of my
own specialization, the history of late medieval Florence.
The field of Florentine historiography has been particularly vibrant in
the past thirty-odd years. Since the publication in 1955 of Hans Baron’s Cvv-
sis of the Early Italian Renaissance, and particularly in the anglophone
world, dozens of historians have studied the history of that city. Some have
focused their attention on Florentine social structures, others on economic
development, still others on the history of humanism.
Yet, from Baron himself to Gilbert and Rubinstein among the older,
German-born generation, to Becker, Brucker, Martines and Weinstein
! Durand (1981).
2 First published in the Revue historique of 1975, Mousnier’s call for this enquéte is
reprinted in Hommage (1981), XXI-XXIII.
> Chittolini (1988a).
who represent the first native American group of Florentinists, to the even
younger generations in England, Australia and the U.S. who entered the
field more recently, one of the constant historiographic preoccupations
has been the nature of the Florentine state. This preoccupation is not acci-
dental. Baron’s own magisterial interpretation of early Renaissance
humanism appeared in the very same year of the Tenth International Con-
egress of Historical Sciences when, perhaps, the key issues discussed were
those raised by F. Hartung and R. Mousnier in their joint presentation
regarding Quelques problèmes concernants la monarchie absolue* In the
very next year, 1956, Federico Chabod presented in Paris his influential
essay, significantly entitled Y a-1-il un Etat de la Renaissance? Several
other scholars joined the discussion in the years following. Clearly the
question at hand was not new. Arguably, as far as Italy goes, Burckhardt’s
own formulation of the «state as a work of art» (Der Staat als Kunstwerk)
had anticipated some of the subsequent discussion. But the question of
the nature of the modern state was very much in the air during the very
years when the anglophone historiography on Florence was getting off the
ground. It was inevitable that the more general discussion would have had
a bearing on the orientation of the then budding field of Florentine histo-
riography.
What, then, can one ask, was the interpretation of the Florentine state
which emerged from the work of these scholars? Very briefly, we can com-
pare three books published within three years of each other: Nicolai Rubin-
stein’s The Government of Florence Under the Medici (London, 1966); Mar-
vin Becker’s Florence in Transition (Baltimore, 1967-8); and Lauro Mar-
tines’ Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1968).
When these works were first published, there was a rush of discussion
which tended to dwell upon their differences and on the particularity of
each author’s interpretation. Rubinstein’s work viewed the development of
Florentine politics from the perspective of electoral politics, Becker’s from
that of fiscal policy, while Martines examined, above all, the contributions
of lawyers to the functioning of the Florentine government. Yet, despite
these differences, the conclusions of all three are strikingly similar. Rubin-
stein, Becker, and Martines were concerned with describing a historical
process which sprouted into a form of state which, whether or not one calls
it modern, was very different from the governmental forms which had pre-
dated it. Thus, Rubinstein analyzed the Florentine “constitution” whose
àHartung et Mousnier (1955), IV, 3-55.

> Originally delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1956, Chabod’s text was first pub-
lished in 1958. It is now found in Chabod (1967), 605-621.
2. PATRONAGE AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN ITALY 33
manipulation enabled the Medici to concentrate in their hands and those of

their trusted allies the vital electoral organisms upon which they relied to
control power. Becker, for his part, emphasized the emergence of «public
law», which, in the course of the Renaissance, supplanted «private immu-
nities», while «traditional forms of government intimately associated with
the era of the medieval commune dissolved». And in another passage, taken
from a justly acclaimed article of his, Becker compared the Florentine state
of the fifteenth century to the «proverbial Leviathan», an institution which
had emerged from the «chrysalis of the Commune» to become the state of
the Renaissance. Finally, Martines emphasized the strengthening, both in
Florence and in Milan, of the powers of the executive and of the central-
ized government, which, in some of its manifestations, he argued, was lead-
ing in the direction of the «modern absolutist state». Of the three histori-
ans to whose work we just referred, Martines was the most cautious and
tentative in formulating his generalizations on the possible modernity of the
Renaissance state. Yet, even he tended to emphasize the centralizing and
modernizing aspects of the new governments which emerged in the fif-
teenth century. What unifies — at a conceptual and interpretive level — these
three studies as well as other interpretations of those years is their general
neglect of particularistic institutions and tendencies which eroded the
power of the central government. What unifies them even more is their
emphasis on such categories as bureaucracies, executive power, territorial
ly united states, elements which underscored the modernity of the Renais-
sance state.
Let us now look at three other works on Florentine history, written more
recently: Ronald Weissman’s Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence
(New York, 1980); D. V. and F. W. Kent’s Nezghbors and Neighborhood in
Renaissance Florence (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1982); and Richard Trexler’s
long article of 1983, devoted to the Ciompi revolt and entitled Neighbors
and Comrades. In none of these three does one detect a particularly keen
interest in the history of the state. Quite to the contrary. Where Rubinstein,
Becker and Martines focussed their collective attention upon government
institutions and were inclined to define the term “Florence” as a political
and ideological entity, these younger scholars have focussed their attention
upon a set of categories which, on the surface of things, has very little to do
with the Florentine state. In his own analysis, Weissman concludes that the
Florentines of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lived in a world dom-
inated by their neighborhoods, within which they developed their most sig-
nificant social relations. Florence itself, rather than perceived as an entity
whose unity was expressed in its very government, is perceived by Weiss-
man as a conglomerate of small villages, of quasi-autarchic neighborhoods
which delimited and defined the social and intellectual horizons of most
Florentines.® In vain will one look to Weissman’s book for an explanation

of the development of the Florentine state in the fifteenth century. The
Kents pursue the very same theme in their study of one of Florence’s six-
teen administrative units, the gonfalone Lion Rosso. Where Weissman,
before, had overlooked the preceding discussions on the Renaissance state,
the Kents do take them into account. Yet, they appear impatient with the
questions raised by previous scholars. The explanations regarding «the ‘sta-
tist’ pressure» allegedly exerted in the fifteenth century «hardly seem to do
justice to the complex social and political situation» which they detect in
Florentine society. It is the neighborhood which emerges as the dominant
political and social category of the Kents’ narrative, a category which rep-
resented a «distinct and individual corporate world», one which «served as
an intermediary between the citizen and the commune».’ Very much the
same picture is established in Trexler’s article, one of whose overriding con-
clusions is that neighborhood associations helped create the crudal solidar-
ities at the time of the Ciompi revolution.®
Thus, it appears that anglophone historiography on late mediaeval Flo-
rence has completed an interpretive trajectory of some magnitude during
the last dozen or so years. From a preoccupation with discovering the
roots of the modern state in the history of Florence, a number of Ameri-
can and Australian scholars are now attempting to demonstrate that the
city’s much vaunted modernity evaporates when Florentine history is
examined through the prism of concepts appropriated from the social sci-
ences, above all anthropology.’ This is not the occasion in which to assess
the contributions made by this younger generation of historians. Nonethe-
less, what is directly relevant to our proceedings is the fact that the subject
of patronage hardly appeared in the work of the first three scholars to
whose monographs we already referred, while, without any question at all,
it has dominated the interpretation of Weissman, the Kents and Trexler.
Clearly, this is not a coincidence. For it will be my claim in the balance of
my brief presentation that it was difficult, if not altogether impossible, to
conceive and discuss the subject of patronage so long as the dominant his-
toriographic preoccupation was that of tracing the history of the “modern
state”. Chabod’s early vision of a «stato impersonale, razionale, legalistico,
burocratico, livellatore»!° could easily be accommodated to Becker’s view
° Weissmann (1966).
’ Quotation found in Weissmann (1966), 5 and 8.
$ Trexler (1983).
? A notable exception to this generalization is the incisive essay by Brown (1984), 285-300.
10 Chabod (1934), 175.
of the Florentine state as the «proverbial Leviathan», but could hardly

come to terms with Weissman’s «small-scale, face-to-face society of the
Renaissance town». And, to follow Weissman’s explanation, it was pre-
cisely the patron «who provided the requisite links... in such a fragmented
world».!!
In some important respects, the interpretative shifts evident in the field
of Florentine historiography are themselves reflections of wider changes of
interpretation which characterize the debate regarding the nature of the
early modern state in Italy. Increasingly, the discussion regarding the mod-
ern state has distanced itself from the positions embraced by Antonio
Anzilotti, Francesco Ercole and even by the young Chabod himself. During
the first half of this century the roots of the modern state were found in the
very governments which emerged in Italy during the late medieval and early
modern eras. The “Renaissance state” was marked by a number of charac-
teristics: the emergence of a hationalist spirit, the growth of governmental
responsibilities, the slow taking shape of bureaucracies and the consequent
increase in the administrative efficiency with which the new governments
were run; conversely, the dilution of old feudal obligations, the levelling out
of old particularistic institutions, the erosion of regionalism — all these were
themes upon which earlier scholars had concentrated their attention. Yet,
even Chabod himself, in the years immediately following his Parisian
address on the Renaissance state, had presented a much more nuanced and
complex image of the Milanese state in the sixteenth century, a picture
which, if dominated by certain modernizing elements (such as the «forte
organizzazione centralizzata» and an «organizzazione burocratica cen-
trale») also contained components endowing it with «caratteristiche di
stampo tutt'altro che moderno».! This sensitivity to the complexity of the
early modern Italian states and to the absence of a linear growth from the
medieval commune to the modern state (conceived in essentially Weberian
terms) was expressed even more strongly some years following Chabod’s
death by Marino Berengo. In 1967 he seemed to turn the old generaliza-
tions on their head when he asserted that the most dominant characteristic
of the sixteenth-century Italian states, far from being their centralizing ten-
dencies, was the «trionfante particolarismo dei corpi», a phenomenon
which in many senses represented an inversion of a course already under-
taken by some fifteenth-century republican regimes.! In more recent years,
thanks primarily to the reflective syntheses of a number of historians,
11 Weissmann (1966), 22-23.

12 Chabod (1958), 251.
5 Berengo (1968), I, 490.
among whom Chittolini, Fasano, Galasso and Musi have presented partic-
ularly persuasive arguments, a greater balance has been struck in the gen-
eral interpretation of explanations of Italian state-building.* Thus, Chit-
tolini has argued that there is a nearly contrapuntal relationship between
the gradual increase in the authority of the sixteenth-century prince and the
parallel propensity of the new states to recognize and legitimate old bodies
and local institutions. As was the case in other parts of Europe, Chittolini
identified in the Italian course of political events the same “dualism”
between a «potere centrale o ‘sovrano’... e... una serie di nuclei territoriali
compatti che avevano rinunciato forzatamente all’indipendenza, ma non
alla difesa delle loro libertà». And Fasano, although expressing some
doubts about Chittolini’s tendency to discuss Italian history in light of a
presumed “crisis” of the sixteenth century, adopts a similarly balanced and
complex view. In her most recent discussion of these problems, she suggests
that central and peripheral institutions shared a «complementarità di fun-
zioni», a state of affairs, at least in the state of Tuscany, not only tolerated
but encouraged by the prince.
There is a great deal of historical work recently completed which rein-
forces the view of the early modern Italian state as neither medieval and
feudal (in the sense that it fell victim to deeply rooted centrifugal forces
inherited from the past), nor as the precocious anticipation of modernizing
tendencies which would emerge later in other European societies. Rather,
the same complex balance of forces, institutions and tendencies seem to
characterize Italian history as that identified by Oestereich and Mousnier
in their discussions of Transalpine political history. For Italy itself, F Diaz’s
description of Cosimo I’s attempt to “ménager” a Florentine tradition by
solicitously preserving certain institutional and political traditions of long
standing while creating his stato nuovo; R. Burr Litchfield’s thorough
demonstrations that the functionaries of the new Medicean state were
drawn largely from the city’s traditional ruling class; Fasano’s own studies
on the relationship of Florence to its subject cities and territories and on
the accommodation reached between provincial élites and the ducal court
of Florence; Cozzi’s studies on the administration of justice in Venice and
Sicily; de Mesquita’s and Chittolini’s analyses of the balance of forces
between the Milanese szgnorza and the great feudal families of Lombardy —
all these studies and many more underscore the variety of arrangements
possible in the course of the constant dialectic between centrifugal and
centripetal forces at work on the Italian scene during the late medieval and
‘4 Chittolini (1979) and his Introduzione to Chittolini (1979a), Fasano (1973), her Intro-
duzione to Fasano (1978), and Fasano (1983), Galasso (1974), and Musi (1979).
2. PATRONAGE AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN ITALY Bi
early modern centuries.! And if it is true, as Galasso has argued, that Italy
during that era was a «pluralita di formazioni politiche», if its history was
«una storia parallela delle singole formazioni politiche presenti nel paese»,
it might also be possible to argue that the country’s multiple histories were
infused with a certain degree of unity by their common experiences in
struggling to provide a balance between center and periphery, centralizing
and dispersive forces, attempts to preserve past privileges and those aimed
at creating new ones. But, out of their collective research little seems now
to remain of Chabod’s early vision of the Renaissance state as an “imper-
sonal, rational, legalistic, bureaucratic, levelling” entity. Efforts to attain
that goal in sixteenth-seventeenth-century Italy would fail, as power
remained fragmented, dispersed, refracted through old and new institu-
tions. }
The topic of patronage in Italian society emerges as an important sub-
ject of study precisely because of the realization regarding the nature of
political power and the character of the states which governed the penin-
sula. Patronage in the era from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries
operated very much in the same political space which it had occupied
before: in the interstices of the state, offering members of various groups,
orders, associations or geographical entities access to rewards, offices,
prizes, protection, fiscal advantage, judicial clemency and the like. In this
sense, it may be possible to suggest that the political changes of the early
modern period, regardless of the particular configuration in each state, left
enough room available for the survival of a political culture based on the
institution of patronage.
Indeed, the more one studies various periods of Italian history, the more
one is struck by the longevity and durability of this institution. Paul Veyne
recently wrote a masterful study of clientage in the late Roman Empire, in
which he argued that «le Bas-Empire offre dans bien des domaines le spec-
tacle de la clientéle». Significantly, he added that those who perceive the
persistence of clientage as a reflection of the weakness of the Roman state
fail to understand how essential patronage was to the very survival of the
government itself.!° Cinzio Violante, writing on eleventh-century Milan,
refers, without particular comment, to the patronage network cultivated by
bishop Arimberto.!” And when we move up in time to the history of the
5 For full and more extensive bibliographic references the reader is advised to consult
the “Introduzioni” written by Chittolini and by Fasano to their respective anthologies cited
in the preceding note.
16 Veyne (1981).
17 Violante (1974), 232 and following.
fourteenth-fifteenth-century communes we encounter myriads of examples,

many of them studied at great length in recent years, which illustrate the
resilience and adaptability of the institution of patronage. Lorenzo de’
Medici’s often quoted statement, in which he sought to explain the reasons
which induced him to follow in his father’s and grand-father’s steps and
assume the leadership of the city, is itself a clear and colorful reference to
the strength of the patronage system in that most Renaissance of Italian
cities: «... mal volentieri accettai, e solo per conservazione degli amici e
sostanze nostre, perché a Firenze si può mal vivere senza lo stato».! All
throughout the entire chronological span of Italian history, down to Jeremy
Boissevain’s, Sydel Sylverman’s and Paul Littlewood’s recent studies on
contemporary Italy, the institution of patronage is ubiquitous, a sort of deep
structure ineradicable from Italian political culture.”
The three studies presented to our conference fall, I believe, within the
historiographic tradition sketched above. In examining the efforts of
Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, to create a state ex novo, Barberis
focusses his attention on the plan to establish a citizen militia. The object of
this initiative was to undermine, if not eliminate, old feudal ties between
local lords and their subjects and to create direct ties of dependence
between the Duke and his subjects. But the effort failed, precisely, as Bar-
beris notes, because the «mediazione di elementi locali è oggettiva, neces-
saria e inquinante». So, in the end, the Duke was forced to take into
account the local situation (the «microconflittualità locali») and to rely on
the very notables, whose position he had initially attempted to subvert, as
the key elements of his army and as the agents through whom local control
could be exercised in the provinces of the Duchy. Thus, the process of
“state-building” was subjected precisely to the type of accommodations
which, as we already noted, historians of early modern Italy have highlight-
ed in their recent work. It may be worth observing that the dynamic ele-
ment in the picture drawn by Barberis is represented by the local forces
which, it would appear, by virtue of tradition and the web of complex mate-
rial and power interests, impeded the realization of Emanuele Filiberto’s
ambitious plans. In some important respects, Chittolini presents a slightly
different image in his own essay. For, in studying the relationships of
patronage which grew out of feudal grants awarded in northern Italy from
the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, he seems to indicate that in his
estimation the crucial agent was the central government which, at some
! Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ricordi, in Roscoe (1902), 426.

©” Boissevain (1966); Littlewood (1974); Sylverman (1975).
points was able to impose its authority, while at others, because of the pre-
vailing diplomatic and military situation, was constrained to come to terms
with established feudal lords, or to award new feudal grants to land-own-
ing or military families. Thus, in the generally fluid and unsettled world of
fifteenth-century politics, as territorial states were being created, political
spaces were made available to local lords who, drawing on their own
authority and wealth, gathered about themselves clienteles and managed to
insert themselves in the power structures of their territorial states. In the
Valpadana of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the other hand,
when the central government was in a position to wield its own power
directly and effectively, the number and extent of feudal grants were severe-
ly limited, so that the clientage relationships based on these grants dimin-
ished in importance. Thus, implicitly but forcefully, Chittolini questions the
views of some recent scholars, Ruggiero Romano and Philip J. Jones above
all, that the overarching and most significant development of Italian histo-
ry from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century was the continuous
“refeudalization” of central and northern Italian societies. Not so, suggests
Chittolini, for the changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rep-
resented a substantial break from the preceding developments. Chittolini
does add that an outcome of these changes was the establishment of new
networks of patronage. He does not identify these, although I suspect that
it would be important to examine the shifting patterns of patronage in an
area subjected to a noticeable increase of central power. Lepre’s paper,
broader in scope and more widely ranging than the others, represents an
effort to explore the underlying causes explaining the resilience and
longevity of clientelar structures in a vast area of the peninsula (the Mezzo-
giorno), over a long period of time, from the late Middle Ages to the early
nineteenth century. In many respects, his interpretation neatly comple-
ments and expands upon points already made here. One of the keys to
Lepre interpretation is his insistence on the vital importance of feudalism
in the South. It was that region’s feudal structures which left a pervasive
cultural legacy («[]’] indispensabilita del potente veniva... a radicarsi pro-
fondamente nella mentalità contadina») and a highly fragmented political
and economic situation. A multiplicity of baronial curias dominated the
region and within each barony, where peasants were kept largely isolated
from the regional market-place, overlapping and complementary patronal
webs were fashioned by the baron’s agents, each in charge of a specific area
of administration. Once the barons themselves took up residence in Naples,
where they could be kept under the surveillance of the royal court, the
feuds were left almost entirely under the daily administration of the baron’s
agents. New centers of clientage were now forged in baronial palaces in
Naples, so that in urban centers and rural areas, because of the traditional
fragmentation of political power and the parallel survival, over so long a

period of time, of feudal structures and traditions, patron-client relations
retained their importance.
The general picture which emerges from these papers is clear enough:
The political changes introduced in Italy during the early modern era,
whatever their importance and extent, seem to have borne little or no influ-
ence at all on the continuing viability of patronage and clientage. Whether
we examine Piedmont, Lombardy or the South, we discover that patronage
flourished in the early modern period. We are likely to have made the very
same discovery had we cast our attention on the Veneto, or Liguria, or Tus-
cany, had we concentrated on cities well inserted in the market economy or
on hamlets perched on the Appennines or the Alps. And where, as all three
papers suggest, one form of patronage was forced out of the scene because
of political changes, it was replaced by another form of patronage. It would
seem, therefore, that, at least on this score, Mousnier’s warning had been
quite right: Patronage emerges as a deep structure, a kind of timeless fix-
ture on the political landscape. But, if that is so, a question inevitably comes
to mind: Does such a deep structure, whose permanence seems eternal,
have a history of its own? After all, should it not be possible to identify and
measure the changes over such a longue durée just as historians, recently,
have been able to reconstruct the histories of other seemingly timeless and
ahistorical subjects? More specifically, what was the influence upon patron-
client relationships of the shifting economic, political and fiscal structures
of various Italian societies during the late mediaeval and early modern eras?
There is a need to inject a temporal dimension into the study of patronage,
to see it in a specific and time-bound context. Even the most recent study
on the subject, Jean-Claude Waquet’s book on corruption in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Florentine society, tends to force the study of
patronage out of its particular historical context into a conceptual frame-
work just as easily adaptable to ancient Rome, to early modern Europe, and
to the contemporary U.S. and U.S.S.R.!”°
So, in conclusion, we come to the question of definitions. In my estima-
tion, an attempt to define patronage in all its manifold manifestations is
likely to be exceedingly difficult, perhaps even fruitless. The discussion we
held in our colloquium kept raising a series of seemingly insoluble prob-
lems precisely, it appears, because it is difficult to offer a valid and accept-
able comparison between historical situations as different as England was
from Spain, and Scotland from Italy. Maczak in his opening remarks
warned us of this very problem when he said that «every generalization
20 Waquet (1984).
about patronage finds its contradiction in another case». And Koenigs-

berger seemed to echo this very point when he added that it was «not pos-
sible to construct overall theories» on the question of clientage and patron-
age. Surely, it might be feasible to suggest a general definition of sorts which
would emphasize the reciprocity and social asymmetry of patron-client rela-
tions. But the utility of such a definition for historians is likely to be limit-
ed because it does not take into account local, specific, idiosyncratic con-
ditions prevailing in different polities. Parenthetically, one should add here
the obvious point that the diversity of economic and social conditions and
of political and cultural traditions was as great in Italy as in the German
Empire and that attempts to force the Italian scene into a rigid theoretical
explanation will likely lead to disagreements and contrasts similar to those
already encountered in our discussion.
What, then, should we do? In seeking to overcome the conceptual dead-
end into which I seem to have backed myself in thinking about the question
of patronage, I was struck by Pietro Schiera’s contribution to our discus-
sion. For Schiera, if I understood him correctly, suggested that patronage is
difficult to define precisely because it is not an institution, but rather
because it facilitates the functioning of social and governmental institu-
tions. Metaphorically, it can be thought of as a lubricant of sorts; or, if one
will, an engine easily adaptable from situation to situation. In my mind, I
have now come to think of it in somewhat the same terms that I use to think
of ritual: ever present in all societies, nonetheless, it assumes forms partic-
ular to each society. Ritual seems to respond to some deeply felt need of
beings to order their social exchanges and their private lives according to
some socially determined forms. One should leave anthropologists, socio-
biologists, ethologists and other such sages to tell us whether patronage also
responds to similar needs. Let me simply say here that the example of Italy
from Roman times to our very own days provides us a case study of the
ubiquity of patronal-clientelar ties. And one starts with Rome and not ear-
lier, not because the Etruscans were more virtuous and noble but because
the evidence on them is so scanty. If what I have just said were so then what
becomes important in the study of patronage is the very local situation
examined and in whose context patronal relations were developed. The
economy, social relations, political structures, cultural traditions, religious
beliefs — all these provided a concrete historical context within which
patron-client relations were forged. And not the least virtue of the three
papers submitted to our session is that their authors trace with such
admirable precision the local conditions which, in Piedmont, in Lombardy
and in the Mezzogiorno gave rise to patron-client relations in the early
modern age.
DI
COSIMO DE’ MEDICI: PATER PATRIAE OR PADRINO?
Cosimo de’ Medici’ political biography, at least in its basic outlines,

has been well known for centuries.! The son of Giovanni di Bicci de’
Medici, himself the founder of his family’s famous bank, Cosimo was born
in 1389 and was first drawn into politics during the 1410s. In the follow-
ing decade he became the leader of a political faction, which, during the
years of the war against Lucca (1429-33), clashed with older factions, led
by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, Niccolò da Uzzano, and other patricians whose
families had become politically entrenched after 1382. Cosimo” increasing
power, based as it was on his great financial resources, his astuteness, and
the successful organization of his relatives, friends, and clients (parenti ed
amict) into an effective political force, led to his banishment from the city
in 1433, shortly after the ignominious conclusion of the first Florentine
war against Lucca. But, as most historians know, not quite one year later
his opponents were themselves forced into exile and Cosimo was recalled
from Venice.
Thus was initiated the long era of Medicean domination which, except
for two relatively short intervals totalling twenty-one years, lasted nearly
three centuries. Cosimo, the founder of his family’s extraordinary fortunes,
savoured his success for thirty years until his death in 1464. During that
period not only did he consolidate his family’s primacy in Florence and
administer his bank’s affairs, but he also distinguished himself as the prime
Florentine patron of the arts. In the interval, he brought about a volte-face
in the conduct of Florentine diplomacy by abandoning the Florentine-
| Fabroni (1789), Gutkind (1940), Gombrich (1960), Brown (1961), de Roover (1963),
Rubinstein (1966), Kent (1978). This article was submitted for publication before the
appearance of Professor Kent’s book which, thanks to her generosity, I was able to read in
typescript form. All references to Professor Kent’s exceedingly important contribution are
to the typescript and not to the published version of it.
Venetian alliance, traditionally directed against the proverbial Florentine

enemy, Milan, and helping to install at the helm of the Milanese state an old
and trusted friend of his, the mercenary Francesco Sforza. Architect of the
Lega Italica of 1455, friend and associate of popes, princes, and sigrorz, so
universal was the esteem in which he was held, so great his success that,
shortly after his death, the Florentine government bestowed upon him the
title pater patriae, father of the fatherland.
If, indeed, enough facts are known about Cosimo with which to write a
reasonably detailed chronicle of his life, it is also true that the work of
recent historians has provided important analytical tools with which to
understand particular aspects of his experience. Raymond de Roover’s
splendid history of the Medici bank offers numerous insights into the
financial infrastructures of the Medici family in the Quattrocento and of
Cosimo’s remarkable capacities as manager of his clan’s vast fortunes. Per-
haps even more relevant to the political historian is the work of two other
scholars: Nicolai Rubinstein and Gene Brucker. The first has unravelled,
in a punctilliously precise analysis, the complicated mechanisms used by
Cosimo and his descendants to control the commune’s electoral councils
and by so doing to ensure the screening of possible opponents from
important offices, while concurrently preserving virtually intact the facade
of communal, republican institutions. Gene Brucker’s contribution,
though less direct in the sense that he has not explicitly analyzed the polit-
ical history of Florence after 1434, is equally important, for in his various
studies Brucker has advanced a theoretical framework within which to
interpret the social and political history of Florence in the late Trecento
and the Quattrocento.? Very briefly, Brucker’s thesis is that following the
defeat of the Florentine proletariat in 1378, and the establishment of an
aristocratic regime in 1382, the corporate structure of Florentine politics
was emptied of its significance and that during this era, which begins in the
late fourteenth century and spans the years of the Medicean regime in the
fifteenth, aristocratic and individualistic institutions and values dominated
the social and political structures of the city. Where before 1378 collec-
tivist impulses had prevailed (albeit, Brucker would insist, in the most ten-
uous and fragile of ways), in the subsequent period personal ties of friend-
ship and particularly of cliental relations determined the conduct of poli-
tics. More recently Dale Kent, who though she is not a student of Bruck-
er's can nevertheless be considered his ablest disciple, has written the his-
tory of the Medici party in the years immediately preceding Cosimo’s exile
in 1433 and his subsequent repatriation one year later by applying rigor-
Brucker (1969) contains a concise presentation of the author’s views.

3. COSIMO DE’ MEDICI: PATER PATRIAE OR PADRINO? 45
ously prosopographic standards in her reconstruction of Florentine poli-

tics of those years.’
The Medicean manipulations of electoral processes and the cliental
structure of Florentine society throughout the Quaztrocento are, then, the
two prevalent explanations currently available to help one assess the impact
which the Medici had on the politics of their city. An attempt to understand
Cosimo’ contribution to the creation and consolidation of the Medicean
regime must start by acknowledging the considerable value of Rubinstein’
and Brucker’s contributions, even if in the end one will need to alter not
only details but also certain important aspects of the current generaliza-
tions. In this brief, programmatic essay I shall touch upon three specific
aspects of Florentine political realities which may help one understand the
nature and limits of Cosimo’s power. These aspects I have labelled: class,
political fragmentation, and patronage. I shall deal with each in turn, trying
in the process to specify what I mean by them.
One can start by referring to a term which, for the past five centuries,
has served as a pendant to Cosimo’s name. For, only a few months after his
death on 1 August 1464, the Florentine government granted Cosimo the
title pater patriae, an honor never until then earned by any Florentine. This
posthumous acclamation, as Alison Brown has elegantly shown, codified
sentiments existing in his life, for Cosimo never lacked a number of syco-
phants ready to extol his virtues and accomplishments.’ If Quattrocento
>In addition to her book, mentioned in note 1, see Kent (1975) and Kent (1976).
4 Brown (1961), see note 1. See, also, Benedetto Dei’s Cronaca in Manoscritti, 119, £. 14v,
commenting on Cosimo’ exile in 1433: «Somma delle somme pella novità e chaciata d’un
tanto groriosissimo cittadino quanto era Chosimo de’ Medici, colona, fontana e stendardo di
tutta Italia e padre de’ poveri...». No sooner had the Medici been recalled to Florence than
overly flattering letters from friends began reaching them. An example: MAP V, 653,
Malpiglio d’Antonio di Malpiglio Cicioni to Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici in Venice, 20
November 1434: «Vegho la nostra patria, la nostra cità medichata e ata a prosperare durante
el buon ghoverno principiato». A number of panegyrics for Cosimo and other members of
the Medici family can be found in BNE Manoscritti Palatini, 215, especially ff. 90r, 91r, 92v-
93r. Typical of the tone of these poems is the one addressed to Cosimo and his brother Loren-
zo (therefore composed before the latter’s death in November, 1440) by Anselmo Calderoni:
«Sonetto di messer Anselmo Chalderoni, mandato a Chosimo de’ Medici in laude della virtù
di lui e di Lorenzo, a onta de’ Malivoli invidiosi. O lume de’ terrestri ciptadini, o chiaro spec-
chio d’ogni merchatante, o vero amicho a tutte hopere sancte, ho onor degli illustri fiorenti-
ni, o speranza de’ grandi e de’ piccini, o socchorso d’ogniun ch’é bisogniante, o de’ pupilli et
vedove ajutante, o forte schudo de’ Toschan confini, o sopr’ ogni altro a’ dDio charitativo, o
prudente o temperato, giusto e forte, o padre al buono e patrignio al chattivo, o di somma
pietate larghe porte, o aversario d’ogni atto lascivo, o tu che rendi per mal buone sorte, dob-
bian fino alla morte, per Chosmo e Lorenzo tutti noi, poveri preghar senpre Iddio per voi.»
A somewhat altered version of this poem was recently published by Lanza (1973), p. 344.
Florentines would have had little difficulty understanding the courtly ambi-
ence in which such extravagant praise was born, as is suggested by certain
sardonic asides found in contemporary sources, it is true that subsequent
historians have tended to be more generous to Cosimo.’ Some have argued,
many more have assumed, that not only was he a benevolent, paternalistic
figure, forever eager to have commerce with Florentines of all stations of
life, exchanging pleasantries with contadini and artigiani, forsaking the for-
malities and rigors which his position in society bestowed upon him, but
also that through his extraordinary largesse he provided employment for
masons, carpenters, smiths, scribes, and craftsmen of all kinds, so that in
the end the interpretative tradition seems fully to have justified the first half
of his title. As for the second half, particularly in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, it has been accepted even more unquestioningly than the
first. For patria often has been equated with stato, and one is well aware of
the layers of meaning with which this term has been endowed: the state as
a work of art, an abstract notion, an ideal encompassing and transcending
particularistic institutions and traditions, such as the Parte Guelfa, tower
societies, guilds, confraternities, the extended family, even the relics of
those social classes which had existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies. Thus, Cosimo, it has been suggested, was parer of just this type of
centralizing organism; he was the astute political leader (a condition not
precluding either his benevolence or paternalism) of a government which
encompassed and dominated all of society. Political historians, the argu-
ment runs, must focus their attention on communal institutions centered on
the Palazzo de’ Signori, on the men who most frequently and successfully
served the government in its major magistracies, and on their relations with
Cosimo and his lieutenants.
Elsewhere I have argued that this emphasis on prosopography, on the
identification of ruling elites and the exposition of their internal histories,
has often resulted in a distortion of our perception of political processes in
the Tre- and Quattrocento by eliminating any trace of that intense class con-
sciousness and of class conflict which are clearly evident in contemporary
documents.° This consideration is directly relevant to an interpretation of
? See, for example, Filippo di Cino Rinuccini’s comment, written two years after Cosimo’s
death: Rinuccini (1840), C-CV, referring to Cosimo” son, Piero, but with clear enough refer-
ence to the position inherited by Piero from his father: «sicché si vide chiaro lui esser mani-
festo tiranno nella città nostra; che così adviene dove si lascia fare uno troppo grande sopra
gli altri, che è cosa perniziosissima nelle repubbliche, e sempre poi riesce a questo fine».
° Politics in the Italian Communes: The View from America, a lecture delivered at Boston
University, before the annual meeting of the New England Renaissance Conference, Octo-
bere1975:
Cosimo’ political career and of his title pater patriae. For the title itself, by
positing an abstract notion of the state, would seem nicely to reinforce nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century idealist conceptions, which have been at the
heart of recent interpretations of Italian politics.
Modern historians readily acknowledge that Florentine society was

divided between a majority of poverty stricken and politically oppressed
inhabitants and those few who, by virtue of birth and of economic success,
belonged to the ruling class. Statistics of an increasingly elaborate nature
have been adduced to document the phenomenon. But seldom have the
political and cultural consequences of this division been sufficiently inves-
tigated. I would suggest that the principal characteristic of Florentine life
throughout the Quattrocento, during and following Cosimo’ career, was
the cleavage which rent political and cultural manifestations into experi-
ences perceived and assimilated differently by the rich and the poor.
The rich, of course, knew that they were different. Their entire style of
life from their palaces’ and shops to their country villas and their clothing,
set them apart from their social inferiors. Their very use of language,
throughout the Quaztrocento increasingly allusive, synoptic, esoteric — in
their correspondence and, as much as one can reconstruct it, in their con-
versations — was strikingly different from the concrete, direct, almost earthy
language used by the common folk. And, more pertinently, their attitude
toward the poor as a class brimmed with contempt often translating itself
into a hatred which barely concealed their fear of them. The volghaza desires
peace, apprehensively commented his brother to Cosimo while the Floren-
tine rulers were desperately attempting in the mid-1430s to defeat Lucca.®
The plague is not too bad, wrote Cosimo’s factotum, Matteo di ser Giovan-
ni de’ Rossi; it claims its victims only among gente di bassa mano.’ Better to
die than to live the life of the poor, remarked that other famous contempo-
rary of Cosimo”, and his relative by marriage, Giovanni Rucellai.!° Even
? Rinuccini (1840), XC refers to a government decree passed in February 1462/63 (dates

from 1 January through 24 March are given both in the Florentine and the common styles)
to encourage the construction of houses «perocchè per la grande moltitudine, e per lo assai
murare di belle e grandi case dagli uomini nobili e potenti, pativa il popolo disagio di
abitazioni».
8 MAP XI, 608, Lorenzo di Giovanni de’ Medici in Castelluccio to Cosimo in Ferrara or
Venice, 3 February 1437/38.
» MAP CXXXVIII, 22, Matteo di ser Giovanni de’ Rossi in Florence to Giovanni di
Cosimo de’ Medici in Trebbio, 7 September 1437: «... ci fa danno, ma in giente di bassa
mano, fanciulli et fanciulle il più forte... la terra è molto vota di gente da bene».
10 Rucellai (1960), 16: «Chi non observa misura nello spendere suole presto impoverire,
et chi vive povero in questo mondo, patisce molte necessità et soffera molti stremi bisogni,
preachers and religious figures were often contemptuous of the poor. San
Bernardino of Siena, one of the most popular preachers of the 1420s, in a
sermon delivered in Florence, explained to his listeners that wealth was the
prize conferred by God on those who were obedient to their parents, while
those dishonoring their families would suffer seven penalties, the first of
which would be a life of poverty.!! Nearly half a century later, Piovano
Arlotto, a country priest on cordial terms with the Medici, when visiting a
friend who offered him a meal of coarse and tough salad leaves, exclaimed
indignantly to his host: «Surely, I cannot believe that you intended this
salad for us. These leaves must have been intended for your workers and
masons».! Finally, the Canzona del Popolo, composed by a Giovambattista
dell’Ottonaio and sung during the annual festivities of the carnival, portrays
the populace as a fickle, vengeful, irrational mass which «burns and
destroys itself and those who govern it».!
But how did the poor view their social superiors? Can one posit the exis-
tence of a deferential, symbiotic relationship in which the poor, knowing
their station in life, had developed a resigned, if vaguely hopeful, attitude
about their condition? Had the workers and the poor lost the conscious-
ness, which they had clearly possessed in the Trecento that they shared «an
identity of interests as between themselves and as against their rulers and
employers»?!* Was Florence in the Quattrocento, as France was to be in the
et meglio gli sarebbe morire che stentando vivere in miseria». See also his comments on p.
12 about the sufferings and tribulations of the rich, who are envied and hated by the poor:
«Et conoscendo il povero secondo natura che’ [1] richo atiene alcuna cosa di suo ragione, se
gli porta molto aschio et invidia, onde i richi sono molto perseguitati et molestati». By being
generous a rich man «scema molto la’ nvidia e la malivolenza che i richi portono per le
richezze loro...».
!! Bernardino (1935), 71-72: Children who obey their parents will have seven rewards:
«Il primo Messer Domenedio ti farà ricco di roba e di senno naturale... Chi fa il contrario,
che disonori il padre e la madre, sette cose in contrario arà: Prima, povertà contro a ric-
chezze».
2 Piovano Arlotto (1953), 107: «Postisi a tavola fu dato loro uno vino non molto egre-
gio ed ebono una insalata di borrana e cicerbita, la quale pugneva le mani a chi la lavò, che
quasi non si poteva toccare; pensa chi l’aveva in bocca come faceva!... in modo che i’ Pio-
vano non si poté contenere che non dicessi a messere Giovanni: — Voi avete questa sera
iscambiate le vivande; per certo non posso credere questa sia quella avete ordinato per noi:
dovevano essere queste di questi vostri operai e muratori.» See also his contrast between
«uomini regali, giusti e buoni» and the «uomini poveri» on pp. 64-65.
° Canti carnascialeschi (1936), 302-3: «...vago di mutazion, con suo faville / arde e ruina
sé e chi lo regge; / è d’un linguaggio e parla più di mille; / varia nel vero e mai non si
coregge; / spesso il suo peggio elegge; / trema a un cenno o non teme niente; / sempre nel
fin si pente: / e più variando più resta ingannato...».
!4 A phrase borrowed from Thompson (1968), 12.
seventeenth century, «a society of orders, not one of classes», a suggestion

recently made by Gene Brucker? Unfortunately, neither the evidence is
abundant nor has the surviving documentation been carefully studied. The
police deliberations for the period preceding 1465 consist of a mere three
fragments, while the judicial records, massive and forbidding in their detail
and badly damaged in the flood of 1966, can be studied only with great dif-
ficulty. Hopefully, in a few years’ time, after the work of some extremely
able young American scholars has progressed beyond the stage it has now
reached, we may be able to answer these questions more confidently.’ For
lack of any statistical evidence on criminality, on forms of sociability, on res-
idence patterns, on town-country relations, not to speak of economic and
political perceptions, one has to rely on impressions, collected, one fears, in
a less systematic and scientific method than one might otherwise wish.
Contemporary documents, particularly Quattrocento letters, suggest
that Florentine entrepreneurs with substantial landholdings in the contado
often took an interest in the well-being of their farmworkers. Wealthy land-
lords assumed responsibility for extending small favors to their mezzadri
(sharecroppers): they might fund dowries for young girls; intervene with
political or judicial authorities when their workers ran afoul of the law;
grant small loans or extend the deadlines for the repayment of old ones.
Cosimo de’ Medici, his brother, and their sons often addressed themselves
to problems of this sort in their correspondence with their agents.!° Cosi-
mo’s reputation as a generous and accessible patron rests in part on this
relationship which he, together with other contemporaries of his social
standing, cultivated. Indeed, it is interesting to observe that Angelo
Poliziano’s collection of vignettes about Quattrocento Florence contains
several stories in which Cosimo, while sojourning in his various estates,
entertained his workers in his private residence. Cosimo’s rapport with his
farm workers, which Poliziano sketches in these stories, is based on a sense
of deference, almost of awe, which the wealthy townsman evoked among
5 Four young American scholars are currently working on questions directly relevant to
the themes of this essay. I have profited greatly from my conversations with them, and as I
specifically acknowledge in later sections of this paper, I have learned much from their work.
They are: Samuel Cohn (Harvard U.) writing a thesis on marriage patterns among the poor
in Trecento and Quattrocento Florence; Yoram Milo (Stanford U.) working on the activities
of Jewish moneylenders in mid-fifteenth-century Florence; Jeffrey Newton (Brown U.) writ-
ing on hospitals and the poor from the late thirteenth century to the Ciompi Revolution;
Ronald Weissman (U. of California at Berkeley) completing a thesis on confraternities in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
16 Numerous letters in MAP XI, to Matteo di ser Giovanni de’ Rossi, the principal agent
of the Medici, as well as to Giovanni da Volterra contain information of this sort.
his farmhands. And though occasionally a studied jocularity insinuates itself

in these exchanges, often the stories end either with Cosimo reprimanding
his visitor for inadvertently committing a gaffe, or with the peasant puzzling
over his host’s habits and behavior.” Even so, private and literary docu-
ments suggest that in the countryside, at a timè of acute labor shortages,
landlords did exert an effort to cultivate ties of dependence with their
workers. This relationship, at least as it was perceived by the landlords
themselves, is nicely summarized by Giovanni Rucellai in a passage which
he inserted in his diary in 1480, when he was already an old man. The men
of the rural parish of San Piero a Quarachi, gathering of their own free will,
had decided, records Rucellai, to assume the responsibility of maintaining
his beautiful garden in Quarachi. This they did because the men of the
parish were grateful for the many benefits conferred on them by Rucellai
and also because, he continued in a hopeful vein, it seemed to them that the
beauties of the garden brought fame to their village.'5
Relations between employers and workers seem very different in the city.
When looking at this situation, one’s first impression, shared by many
scholars, is that in the Quattrocento there was no recurrence of the Ciom-
pi Revolution. Workers did not take to the streets to protest their working
conditions and their wages. The collectivist impulses channelled through
the guilds in the Trecento and nurtured during the course of that tumul-
tuous century were undermined in the Quattrocento. But what is one to
make of these generalizations? Perhaps one can begin to assess their valid-
ity by referring to some specific incidents, well documented in contempo-
rary sources.
The first is described in great detail by Francesco di Tommaso Giovan-
ni, a minor politician but astute observer of his times, in his private diary."
On 18 June 1458 Francesco became an official of the Otto di Guardia, the
‘7 Poliziano (1929), 28, n. 45: «Facendo dar Cosmo collattione a un contadino, gli fe’
mettere pere moscatelle dinanzi. Hora essendo colui avvezzo a peruzze salvatiche, disse: Oh,
noi le diamo a’ porci. All’hora Cosmo, volto a un famiglio, disse: Non già noi; levale via!»
Also, p. 161, no. 307: «Confortando Cosmo un povero contadino che si accostasse al fuoco,
essendo gran freddo, gli rispose: Cosmo, e’ non fa freddo. E Cosmo: Io vorrei che tu m’in-
segnassi come tu fai. Rispose: Se voi vi metteste tutti e panni vostri adosso, come fo io e miei,
e’ non vi farebbe freddo». Also, the incident referring to Cosimo’s father, Giovanni, who
after having entertained at dinner one of his numerous friends who were «contadini delle
alpi», asked his wife, Nonnina, «dicesse non so che sonetti; e dimandato poi quel che gne ne
paresse, la lodò, dicendo però che vorrebbe più tosto che le sue nuore sapessero fare di due
cioppe vecchie una nuova, che dire queste favole» (p. 81, n. 169).
!* Rucellai (1960), 23: «parendo agli uomini del popolo... avere riceuti molti benefici da
me, et anchora... che le bellezze... del giardino mio... desse loro fama».
GS, Wb MC bis 2425
internal police. On 7 July, while the Capitano of the Otto was sending Anto-
nio di Piero Boccino da Vercaia, a thief, to be executed, the condemned
man’s mother, seeing her son led away, began wailing in the Piazza della Sig-
noria. No sooner had she started than a tumult (rozzore) began, the armed
escort was assaulted by the onlookers, the thief freed, led to the Church of
San Firenze, and then taken to Santa Croce where he was hidden in the
church’s roof. (I maintain here the passive voice used by the narrator.) The
Otto were immediately mobilized, especially because «the people had risen
in a tumult» (levandosi il popolo a romore). Clearing the crowd from the
Piazza de’ Signori, they made their way toward Santa Croce, amid a hostile
crowd which pelted the passing officials with rocks. Finally gaining access
to the church, with the aid of four maestri sent over by the priors, they
found the thief hiding behind a beam in the roof, brought him down, and
dragged him back to the Piazza de’ Signori, which was piena di popolo.
Summarily condemned for his new crime, he was decapitated in front of the
Porta del Capitano before a «huge crowd» (infinito popolo). «And in this
way», Francesco concludes his description of the execution, «we disabused
the people of their bad habits» (zsgannamo il popolo perchè non s'avezzi).
But the story does not end here, for a few days later the Orzo discovered
that what had seemed only a spontaneous and accidental series of events
was nothing of the sort. Indeed, on the day preceding the incident, a con-
spiracy had been spawned by the thieves vicini ed amici who gathered by
the church of the Camaldoli, carefully planned the operation and preor-
dained that the mother’s wailing was to be the sign to charge the Capitano
and free the prisoner. Eighteen men were arrested as promoters of the con-
spiracy, and «because they were poor people» it was decided to punish
them not by the imposition of a fine, but by exiling them from Florence. All
eighteen received sentences, which varied from one to ten years.
The sad fate of Antonio di Piero Boccino and of his would-be helpers is
not terribly significant in the unfolding of Florentine public events in the
1450s. After all, no Florentine chronicle or contemporary history contains
a reference to this series of events. Francesco di Tommaso Giovanni prob-
ably recorded it in his diary only because he had been so intimately involved
in Antonio’s capture and execution. But the importance of these events may
lie precisely in their typicality, their almost quotidian normality.?° They rep-
20 Rucellai (1960), 50, records what must have been a near riot in 1440, on the eve of the
battle of Anghiari: «Era dentro divisioni cipttadinesche; stettesi più dì sanza sonare ore; fessi
uno bargiello che stava per istanza da Santa Trinita nel palagio de’ Gianfigliazzi che facieva
giustizia di fatto sanza avere a stare a sindachato, così nel contado come nella cipttà, e inpic-
chone molti sanza confessione o chomunione alle finestre del detto palagio e alle sponde del
resented, it seems, a routine manifestation of tensions ubiquitous to the

unfolding of Florentine life, and were therefore unworthy of recording by
chroniclers or historians. An analysis of Francesco di Tomasso Giovanni's
detailed description leads to certain important — if admittedly tentative —
conclusions. To begin with, at least eighteen men, gathering in one place,
decided to assault the communal officials. Moreover, their meeting place,
the church of the Camaldoli, was situated in the parish of Santa Maria alla
Verzaia, from which hailed the friend they were seeking to help. Of the
eighteen, six are identified by popolo (the parish of their residence) and all
six lived either in that parish or in an adjoining one. Moreover, all eighteen
seem to have been members of the working class. Eleven are identified by
profession, and they consisted of a carpenter, a painter, two weavers, a wine
seller, a messenger, a cook, one who lived (or else worked) in the commu-
nal brothel, a goldsmith’s assistant, a cobbler, and a broker (sersale). One
witnesses, in a most tenuous way, therefore, the existence of a local, work-
ing-class community, surrounding the church of the Camaldoli, a commu-
nity which offered its members the possibility of socializing with each other
and of taking common action. Finally, what strikes one about this incident
is the severity of the sentences — one death penalty and eighteen exiles —
and the diarist’s inflexibly sententious and arrogant comment about this
whole affair: «We disabused the people of their bad habits».
These two facts — on the one hand the existence of local working class
communities, and on the other hand the severity and singlemindedness of
upper class repression — are tentatively confirmed in a series of other doc-
uments. Samuel Cohn, in a ground-breaking essay, concluded that, in the
fifteenth century, working-class communities in Florence were character-
ized by a striking incidence of geographic endogamy.*! Workers tended
overwhelmingly to marry in the popolo of their residence, a fact reinforcing
the impression that the parish was the focal point of their lives. A cursory
examination of criminal records of the courts of the Ofto, the Podestà and
the Capitano reveals that a large percentage of cases involved plaintiffs and
culprits who shared residence in the same or in contiguous parishes, or else
common origins in the contado or in foreign countries, or, just as frequent-
ponte a Santa Trinita». Pietro Pietribuoni, in his priorista, BNF, Conventi Soppressi, C. 4.
895, f. 171r, recounts a series of incidents in May 1456 strikingly similar to those described
by Francesco di Tommaso Giovanni. Two strangers, unjustly arrested by the Otto, were
being led to the Palazzo de’ Signori. The crowd began yelling: «Campa, campa. El popolo
ad furia tolgono i detti prigioni alla famiglia, dove un di questi saccomanni entrò nella chiesa
di Sancta Croce. Et i frati lo salvorono, l’altro per uno maggieri fu menato in palagio».
°! Marriage Relations and Class Formation in Primitive Capitalism: Florence during the
High Renaissance, unpublished typescript.
3. COSIMO DE’ MEDICI: PATER PATRIAE OR PADRINO? 515)
ly, who exercised the same occupation.” This pattern, though tenuous,
based as it is on an analysis of fewer than two-hundred cases, if confirmed
by subsequent research, would begin to answer the question of what hap-
pened to the working class in the Quattrocento. Neither did it disappear,
nor did its members acquiesce to the rule of the upper classes. Rather, as
Cohn was first to suggest, the workers had become fragmented and been
repressed. While in the Trecento workers actively and realistically could
aspire to a share of the city’s political control, in the Quattrocento their
field of action seems to have been restricted to neighborhoods or parishes.
How and why this fragmentation took place, and what role the upper class-
es played in bringing about this phenomenon, are questions which research
currently in progress may illuminate in the near future.
Nor does it seem that the same bonds of dependence between employ-
ers and workers which prevailed in the countryside — farmworkers receiv-
ing small benefits and enjoying the protection of their powerful and wealthy
lords, the landowners hoping to maintain a supply of reasonably content
and docile laborers — also prevailed in the city. Poliziano’s nearly four-hun-
dred vignettes drawn from Florentine life during Cosimo’s and Lorenzo’s
days do not once portray a harmonious or pleasant relationship between a
well-to-do Florentine and a city worker. These exchanges are almost invari-
ably characterized by a sharp tension, often breaking into verbal abuse or
physical violence.” Those wealthy Florentines who populate Poliziano’s
stories were all too well aware that the city’s workers were not satisfied with
22 This statement is based on an analysis of the following sources: Otto di Guardia e Balia
14, Capitano del Popolo 3826, Podestà 4847. Some examples, all taken from the sentences
given by the Ofto: f. 7v, 7 January 1460: Five «tessitori drapporum de Alamania» con-
demned for assault; f. 7v, same date: Three inhabitants of the popolo of San Piero Maggiore,
one from popolo of San Simone, and one from an unspecified popolo condemned «pro
ludo»; f. 12r, 13 January 1460/61: Two «portatores» condemned for assaulting another «por-
tatorem»; same folio and date: Niccolò Niccolai de Alamania condemned for having falsely
accused Federigo Curradi de Alamania; f. 12v, 18 January 1460/61: Two «tessitori drappo-
rum» and a «maniscalco» condemned for gambling; f. 20r, 9 February 1460/61: Two «Lom-
bardi» condemned for asaulting a passer-by; f. 23v, 20 February 1460/61: Four «tessitori
drapporum» condemned for unspecified cause. The three volumes consulted contain many
other such cases.
2 Poliziano (1929), 24, n. 38: «Ser Piero Lotti passava per la Vigna, onde un ciompo
mostrògli un votacessi col piombion e disse: Ser Piero togliete quell’anguilla, et egli: To’ quel
intingol tu»; p. 63, n. 135: «Essendo de’ Dieci Cosmo, e con esso un Giuliano di Particino
artefice, huomo audace, advenne che detto Giuliano molto caricava Cosmo in dire che
queste famiglie fanno poco conto de’ popolani»; Angelo Acciaioli, incensed by this behav-
ior, tried to hit the «artefice» but was prevented from doing so by Cosimo who said: «Egl’era
qui fra noi un pazzo, e sarebbe si poi detto che e’ ve ne fussero stati due».
their lot and that many of them could conceive of a different way in which
to govern the city. In one of a handful of stories dealing with fourteenth-
century events which Poliziano included in his collection, a compo (wool-
worker) was confronted by a member of the Albizzi family and asked how
the workers expected to rule the city when they lacked political experience.
The worker’s response was simple: «We shall do exactly the opposite of
what you have done, and by so doing we shall maintain the state».?* And
Poliziano’s inclusion of a one-line proverb betrays an awareness of the exist-
ing relations between those who ruled and those excluded from the city’s
government: «Violence, that is arms, is the judge of appeals of the power-
ful».? Piovano Arlotto, composing the Facezze at about the same time, won-
dered aloud once why it was that «the poor, so much more numerous, did
not pillage the goods of the rich».”° Neither Cosimo’s correspondence, nor
that of any other prominent contemporary Florentine examined in the
preparation of this essay, contains the solicitations for help by urban work-
ers, or the offers of assistance proferred by the rich which, as we noticed,
commonly characterized the relations of workers and employers in the
countryside. The evidence seems to suggest that in the city there was a neat
separation between the rich and the poor and that the bonds of patronage
and of clientage did not extend from the upper echelons to the bottom
rungs of the social hierarchy. Politics in Quattrocento Florence depended
on the maintenance of such a relationship of force between employers as a
class and their workers.
Before concluding this section, it may be interesting to dwell on anoth-
er specific incident, one in which Cosimo played a protagonist’s role. On 16
March 1446, in his capacity as convener (proposto) of the ufficiali del monte,
Cosimo introduced a resolution which led to the reorganization of the sales
tax on wine (gabella del vino). With one exception, this provision does not
deal with wine consumption by private individuals; rather, it outlines pro-
cedures for collecting the tax, identifies the gates through which wine could
be imported into the city, describes the manner in which wine barrels were
to be sealed, and so forth. The one exception deals with the consumption
of wine by workers employed in the wool and silk industries, the over-
** Poliziano (1929), 95-96, n. 199: «... Come credete voi potere mantenere lo stato, i quali
non siete usi, conciosia cosa noi, usi sempre al governo, non l’habbiamo potuto mantenere.
Rispose il clientulo: Noi faremo a punto il contrario di quello che havette fatto voi, e così lo
verremo a mantenere».
© Poliziano (1929), 201, n. 384: «La violenza, overo l’armi sono il giudice dell’appella-
gioni de’ potenti».
‘© Piovano Arlotto (1953), 90, n. 55: «Come i poveri non saccheggiano i ricchi, sendo
26 M Al . . . . . .
maggior numero».
whelming majority of the city’s working class. These workers were prohib-
ited from taking to work more than one small fiasco of wine; the penalty on
offenders was 20 so/di, a sum larger than the daily wage of most workers.”
The law does not offer a reason for the imposition of this restriction, but its
enactment offers a glimpse of the caution, fear, and firmness with which the
rulers of Florence dealt with their workers. This divide, between workers
— as a class fragmented and oppressed, yet capable of creating new bonds
of sociability in neighborhoods and parishes — and employers — dominant,
aware of their preeminence, and ever vigilant of class insubordination —
may well have represented the basic influence in the formation of Quattro-
cento Florentine politics.
Faced by their employers’ systematic oppression after 1382, the workers.

in Florence seem to have had no choice but to redefine the cultural focus
of their lives at the parish and neighborhood levels through which they
maintained a sense of their collective identity. Their employers, triumphant
after 1382, consolidated their domination of the city by relying upon the
system of patronage which, to a very large extent, had enabled them to
impose their hegemony in the past. Clienteles, and the bases which they
offered to powerful politicians, had been traditional features in the history
of Florence. Chroniclers and contemporary observers, from Compagni
through the two Villani to Stefani, often refer to the arzici and seguaci who
formed the rank-and-file membership of cliental groups. Unfortunately,
one knows little about the composition of these clienteles. How did some-
one like Manetto Scali very early in the Trecento, Carlo Strozzi in the after-
math of the expulsion of the Duke of Athens in 1343, or Piero degli Albizzi
before the Ciompi Revolution in 1378, form his political base? Manetto
Scali, according to Compagni, was trusted by the Whites in 1301 precisely
because era potente di amici e di seguito.*® Similarly vague references are
found in other contemporary accounts, to which modern historians have
been prevented by the paucity of the sources from adding much concrete
detail.
27 Monte Comune-Periodo repubblicano, no. provvisorio 1121 (Deliberazioni degli ufficiali

del Monte), f. 7v where it is indicated that on 16 March 1445/46 Cosimo was appointed pro-
posto of the Monte: f. 8r, same date: «...da qui inançi nelle botteghe de’ lanaiuoli, e tintori e
purgatori e setaioli, tintori di seta non possa entrare vino in barile ne in mezo barile sotto
pena di lire venti... Possano i lavoranti sopra detti mestieri portare nelle botteghe ove lavo-
rano ogni dì per loro bere u. fiascho di tenuta di due metadelle e non più delle lor case overo
d’altro luogho, e portando magior fiascho chaggia in pena di s. 20 il fiascho».
28 Compagni (1879), 182-83, II, XVI: «M. Manetta Scali (nel quale la parte Bianca aveva
gran fidanza, perchè era potente di amici e di seguito) cominciò aforzare il suo palagio...».
If the history of clientele groups in the Duecento and early Trecento

remains largely unknown, it is true that when one reaches the very late four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, one begins to perceive patterns explaining
both the norms and traditions which Cosimo respected during his long
political career and those which, because of his success and longevity, he
managed to alter.
Perhaps it might be simplest to start with a brief definition of patronage,
one offered a decade ago by the American anthropologist Jeremy Boisse-
vain: «Patronage is founded on the reciprocal relations between patrons
and clients. By patron I mean a person who uses his influence to assist and
protect some other person, who then becomes his ‘client’, and in return
provides certain services to his patron. The relationship is asymetrical, for
the nature of the services exchanged may differ considerably».” Inherent in
this definition of patronage is the assumption that the patron possesses
goods, things, which he can distribute to his clients. This view, postulating
a fixed relationship between patron and client, has more recently been con-
siderably revised by Boissevain and by a number of political anthropolo-
gists, among whom it strikes me that Paul Littlewood has advanced a most
subtle and interesting interpretation. According to this revised view, a
patron’s position may not at all depend on his possession of goods, but
rather on his ability to bring his clients in contact with other individuals
capable of honoring their requests.?° Thus, in the network of social rela-
tions, a patron tends to maintain his privileged position precisely because
he acts as a broker, a go-between, serving as a source of information for
those offering and those seeking certain goods or services. In return, clients
could provide their patrons with a variety of services. «Clients protect a
patron’s good name and report the activities of his enemies. It is in their
interest to do this, for the stronger their patron is, the better he is able to
protect them... In a society where social prestige is measured by the
resources a person can command to protect and advance the position of his
family, a clientele of persons who owe services of various types is a consid-
erable asset».?!
This definition of patronage seems to me appropriate to the Florentine
political situation. Before and after 1434, bosses such as Donato Acciaioli,
Maso degli Albizzi, Cosimo de’ Medici, and his contemporary Tommaso
Soderini led clienteles whose members expected of their capo favors and
” Boissevain (1966), 19-33; the quotation comes from p. 19.

*° Littlewood (1974), 33-51. The bibliography on patronage is quite vast. Here I cite the
following few works which have helped me to clarify my thinking: Campbell (1964), Geertz
(1960), Mayer (1967), Wolf (1966).
?! Boissevain (1966), 23.
services which in the overwhelming number of cases they could not deliver
directly. More often than not the patron could honor the request only by
addressing himself to yet another individual, an officeholder, a member of
a tax commission, or a Florentine magistrate in the contado or distretto.
Examples of this practice abound in the extant letters of these political
bosses, though it is quite evident that only fragments of their correspon-
dence have survived, and that these fragments, more often than not, con-
tain letters received rather than those written by them. Thus, for example,
Donato Bellandi, who, in early 1389, was serving as pozestà of Vinci, wrote
to Donato Acciaioli that an unspecified :rgiuria had been committed
against one of his notaries. Having taken personal offense, Bellandi now
was pressing the case in the court of the Esecutore «as you advised me to
do». Therefore, «if friendship or family ties mean something, this is the
time that you must help me», he pleaded with Donato.*? Or, again, in June
1394 Cola di Jacopo from Ascoli, who was then chancellor of Pistoia, wrote
to Donato asking that he in turn write to Messer Giovanni Panciatichi who
was then in a position to extend Cola’s term of office.*’ Or, finally, Niccolò
Gherardini of Arezzo asked that Donato intercede with his brother, Cardi-
nal Agnolo Acciaioli, so that the latter might confer an ecclesiastical
benefice to a friend of his.*4
Indeed, the overwhelming bulk of personal letters from that period deal
with rather trivial requests of this sort. And just as was the case with Dona-
to Bellandi whose notary had been offended, but who personally assumed
responsibility for settling this matter and in turn sought to involve his social
and political superior Donato Acciaioli in this affair, these letters also con-
vey the strong impression that at all levels of political society these ties of
dependence, to which Brucker first alluded more than a decade ago,”
offered the only possibility, short of insurrectionary and rebellious attempts
to which disenfranchised and oppressed workers periodically recurred, of
obtaining some of the advantages and emoluments of the existing social and
economic system. Such a web of personal ties of mutual interdependence,
32 Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ashburnham, 1830, cassetta 3, no. 275: Donato Bellandi,

potesta of Vinci, to Donato Acciaioli in Florence; 22 February 1388/89: «la quale ingiuria
reputo essere stata fatta nella mia persona», and he is pressing the case in the court of the
Esecutore «chome voi mi chonsigliaste ch’io faciessi. Per tanto io vi priegho quanto piu
posso, se amista o parentado dee valere, che ora franchamente m'atiate».
3 Ibid., no. 242, Cola Jacobi de Esculo, cancellarius Pistorii to Donato Acciaioli in Flo-
rence, 11 June 1394.
34 Ibid., no. 155, Niccolò di Niccolò Gherardini in Arezzo to Donato Acciaioli in Flo-
rence, 24 November 1385.
35 Brucker (1964), 2-11. Since then Brucker expanded his views in Brucker (1969).
more often than not referred to by contemporaries as arzicizia, created in

the city a series of parallel hierarchies which conditioned the response and
limited the options for political action of those men who comprised the Flo-
rentine political class.
It appears that each of these hierarchies or-clienteles tended to recruit
its members primarily within a restricted geographic area in the city, most
often within the gonfalon in which resided its most powerful members. By
the late Trecento the gonfalons offered a convenient and rather obvious
focus for the political activities of important Florentine politicians. Sixteen
in number, gonfalons were originally assigned responsibility of organizing
the citizen militia, each bringing under its flag its able-bodied men in times
of military or political crisis. With the passage of time in the fourteenth cen-
tury, however, the gonfalons retained only vestiges of that responsibility,
while concurrently acquiring considerable jurisdiction over two important
governmental activities: the distribution of forced loans among the gon-
falon’s inhabitants, and the certification of political eligibility of local resi-
dents during the periodic redactions of electoral lists.*°
Juridically, the authority of each gonfalon was vested in its politically eli-
gible inhabitants, with the gonfalon’s affairs administered by the district’s
chief officer, the gonfaloniere di compagnia, who was often assisted by two or
three pennoniert. Periodic meetings of a gonfalon’s members took place in a
prominent church located within its boundaries. Thus, for example, gon-
falon Drago of Santo Spirito met in the church of San Frediano, Ferza in the
church of San Felice in Piazza, Vaio in Santa Maria sopra Porta, Lion Rosso
in San Pancrazio, Lion d’Oro in San Lorenzo, and so forth.?? Although only
fragmentary records of these meetings have survived, it is clear that one issue
*© Historians of Florence have not given much attention to the institution of the gonfalon
and its importance in the city’s political and social history. Passing references are found in
Davidsohn (1962), V, ch. 2, particularly 276-96. Primarily, however, one must look in the
Commune” Statutes, of which the most easily accessible, and most obvious starting point is
the redaction of 1322-25, edited and published by Caggese (1909), I, liber quintus, rub.
LXXII, LXXXIII-CXI. In this context I should point out that an uncatalogued collection
of documents in the Archivio di Stato of Florence entitled Ufficiali del Fuoco, and compris-
ing more than one hundred volumes, deal entirely with the activities of gonfalon officials
who, it emerges from these documents, were charged with organizing neighborhood fire
brigades, and appointing officials to assess damage caused by fires.
? Except for gonfalon Lion Rosso whose account books were recently discovered in the
archive of the Vallombrosan monastery of San Pancrazio by Prof. William Kent, the history
of the various gonfalons must be reconstructed by examining the cartularies of notaries who,
on occasion, were appointed as official notaries of various gonfalons. Thus, for example, the
cartularies of ser Paolo di Piero di Bartolomeo Banderai, (NA, B 740-767, years 1391-1423)
contain numerous records of gonfalon Lion d’Oro; ser Tommaso di Domenico Carondini
dominated most gonfalons’s deliberations: the distribution of taxes among

all the district’s inhabitants. Frequently, at the conclusion of these meetings,
syndics were appointed, charged with imposing individual assessments, and
often empowered to confiscate and sell at auction property belonging to tax
delinquents.’* Thns, often even after the imposition of the Cazasto in 1427,
the gonfalon, as a corporation, assumed collective responsibility before the
communal exchequer (Camera del Comune) for paying the global assessment
of a forced loan levied on all its inhabitants.
Given the nature of this responsibility, those who controlled each gon-
falon exerted real influence in the distribution of taxes, thus being able to
command the following of less powerful men, and to damage the interests
of their opponents. Indeed, an examination of the surviving deliberations
of various gonfalons reveals that within each district there existed a clearly
articulated elite consisting of two or three dozen families which consistent-
ly were represented in their gohfalon’s meetings. Of the nearly three dozen
records of such deliberations discovered in registers of the notarial archive,
the largest number of participants was seventy-one, but this was an unusu-
al occasion, the only one on which more than fifty men gathered to partic-
ipate in such meetings.
An examination of the electoral lists prepared in the late Trecento and
first half of the Quattrocento reinforces the impression that each gonfalon
was dominated by a small number of men, whose names prevail in the
scrutiny lists of those years. Based upon the figures recently presented by
Dale Kent in her study of the scrutinio of 1433, it is possible to calculate
that, for example, in the gonfalon Vipera in the eight different redactions of
the scrutiny for the three major offices prepared between 1382 and 1453
Bambelli Pacini (NA, C 187-190, years 1409-36) deal with the gonfalon Lion d’Oro; ser
Francesco di Piero Giacomini da Castro Fiorentino (NA, G 209-212, years 1398-1431) with
gonfalon Scala; ser Bartolomeo di Giovanni Lapini (NA, L 54, years 1410-17) gonfalon Vaio;
ser Francesco di ser Tommaso Masi (NA, M 265-268, years 1404-98) with gonfalon Lion
d’Oro; ser Bartolomeo di ser Piero di ser Riccomanno de’ Migliorati da Coiano (NA, M 546,
years 1411-46) with gonfalon Lion d’Oro; ser Piero di Jacopo Migliorelli (NA, M 568-572,
years 1434-77) with the same gonfalon; ser Amerigo Vespucci (NA, V 292-294, years 1429-
72) gonfalon Unicorno and gonfalon Drago, quarter of Santo Spirito; ser Tommaso di ser
Piero di Angelo Cioni (NA, T 565-566, years 1450-53) gonfalon Lion d’Oro. But the task of
systematically exploring the Archivio notarile is almost impossible: about 4,000 volumes for
the fifteenth century alone have survived, only a tiny fraction of which have indexes. The ref-
erences in this note, that is, are not by any means exhaustive; they simply identify some car-
tularies in which such records can be found.
8 Thus, for example, see NA, M 267, ff. 194r-v, 21 February 1443/44, and ff. 287r-v, 15
May 1451 when the syndics of gonfalon Lion d’Oro deliberate on the confiscation of goods
of tax delinquents.
four families (not consistently the same four during these seventy years)
controlled from a minimum of 59.8 percent to a maximum of slightly more
than 71 percent of that gonfalon’s lists of approved candidates for those
three most prestigious offices.’
This same picture also emerges from the 1452 scrutiny for the gon-
falonierate of justice, the single highest Florentine magistracy. A tabulation
of the results of that scrutiny neatly identifies some of the city’s major polit-
ical bosses: the Soderini, for example, controlled 56.52 percent of the eligi-
bilities in their gonfalon (Drago-Santo Spirito); between the two of them,
the Canigiani and the da Quarata more than 58 percent in the gonfalon
Scala; the Nardi alone controlled nearly 55 percent of the eligibilities in
Carro of Santa Croce; the Acciaioli more than 43 percent in Vipera.
The existence of this small number of extremely powerful families with-
in each gonfalon was clearly recognized by contemporaries, some of whom
in their diaries and ricordanze explicitly referred to the phenomenon. Gio-
vanni di Pagolo Morelli, for example, writing sometime between 1390 and
3? Kent (1975), Appendix. An analysis of the electoral lists for the other gonfalons for
which statistics were presented by Kent yields very much the same results.
40 AT, 16: Deliberations of the Accoppiatori of 1452. For a discussion of this document,
which contains the borsa for the gonfalonierate of justice, see: Rubinstein (1966), 45-48. In
the following tables are listed all those families whose members controlled a minimum of20
percent of the polizze of their gonfalon. It should be pointed out that all casate bearing the
same last name have been grouped together.
Quarter of Santo Spirito Gonfalon Scala: Canigiani 27.58%
Quarata 31.03%
Gonfalon Ferze Ridolfi 28.94%
Gonfalon Drago Soderini 56.52%
Quarter of Santa Croce Gonfalon Carro Nardi 54.54%
Gonfalon Ruote Niccolini 22.97%
Gonfalon Bue Cocchi Donati 35.48%
Gonfalon Lion Nero Morelli 295300
Quarter of Santa Maria Novella Gonfalon Unicorno: Bartoli 30.30%
Gonfalon Lion Bianco: Ventura 22.50%
Malegonelle 22.50%
Gonfalon Lion Rosso Rucellai 28.98%
Gonfalon Vipera Acciaioli 43.75%
Quarter of San Giovanni Gonfalon Drago ‘ Carnesecchi 25.00%
Gonfalon Chiavi Pandolfini 25.00%
Gonfalon Lion d’Oro Medici 20.21%
Dietisalvi 20.21%
Della Stufa 20.21%
Gonfalon Vaio Pucci ORION,
Medici 22.22%
1410, urged his sons to become friendly with men in their gonfalon who
might be able to help them.# Giovanni Rucellai, sometime after the middle
of the fifteenth century, echoed this piece of advice, congratulating himself
on his ability to maintain good relations with the men of his gonfalon, who
had always helped him with his tax assessments.’? The private correspon-
dence of many fifteenth-century Florentines, dealing as it does with tax
problems, also reinforces the view that the traditional structure of Florentine
political patronage was based primarily on favors which prominent men
could deliver on the basis of the authority and prestige which they enjoyed
within their gonfalons. This structure fragmented Florence into a series of
patronal enclaves, each of which was dominated by the personality and
influence of a very small number of men able to marshall the respect and
cooperation of friends, clients, and relatives on those occasions when favors
were asked of them.
One example graphically ilfustrates this system. Bartolomeo Cederni, a
merchant of the mid-Quattrocento, is remembered today mostly because of
his massive epistolary, numbering more than five hundred items. Having
been a merchant, Cederni traveled a great deal in Naples, Venice, and,
above all, Pisa. His principal contacts in Florence during his long absences
were members of the Boni and Pandolfini families, as well as the notary ser
Piero di ser Marianno Cecchi. In his numerous letters to them Bartolomeo
constantly bombarded them with entreaties to be sollicitous of his tax situ-
ation, by urging them to discuss his case with his gonfalon’s tax officials.
Cederni was legally a resident of gonfalon Drago of Santo Spirito, a district
dominated by the Soderini family. Responding to one of Cederni’s numer-
ous sollicitations, on 21 November 1447 ser Piero wrote that he had dis-
cussed the matter of his friend’s assessment with the appropriate officials,
receiving from each assurances of good treatment. And, in any case, con-
tinued ser Piero, you ought not to worry about this matter because your
amici ti vogliono bene.” Precisely who these amici were, is made clear in a
41 Morelli (1956), 253: «Appresso, sii cortese: ingegnati d’acquistare uno amico o più nel
tuo gonfalone...»
4 Rucellai (1960), 9: «Non ci à trovato migliore rimedio a difendersi quanto a guardar-
si da non avere nimici... appresso, d’essere in gratia et in benivolentia de’ consorti et de’
parenti et de’ vicini et del resto degl’uomini del tuo gonfalone, de’ quali io m’ 6 molto da
lodare, perchè sempre ne li sgravi che si sono fatti per ’l gonfalone m’anno servito et aiuta-
to et avuto compassione di me».
4 BNE, Conventi Soppressi, 78 (Badia), 312, no 324, Ser Piero di ser Mariano Cechi in
Florence to Bartolomeo Cederni in Pisa, 21 November 1447: «E farò jo cogli altri tuoi amici
e miei quanto sarà possibile, chon quel pocho che jo posso. Ma rinchoromi che ne riuscirai
bene mediante gli amici tuoi che ti vogliono bene...»
letter written on the very next day to Bartolomeo, this one by Tommaso
Soderini, the head of his clan and the undisputed boss of his gonfalon.
Soderini’s letter is laconic «I have received your two letters», he informs
Bartolomeo. «I understand your need and shall do whatever is possible,
and I shall do this voluntarily even if you had not written. Now I shall say
no more on this». To the best of my knowledge, Soderini occupied no
public office at the time, and in his response he offered simply to make
available to Cederni the arsenal of his unofficial and yet tangible influence
in his gonfalon’s affairs. His name reappears on many occasions in these let-
ters. In one, dated October 1453, this one to Bartolomeo who was then
himself in Florence, another resident of the gonfalon, Domenico di Guas-
parre Simone, urged that Bartolomeo go to the piazza, wait for Tommaso,
and if possible speak to him, urging him to please take an interest in a case,
that he does not fully identify.”
In most important respects, the patronage of the Medici family con-
formed to this pattern. In her forthcoming book, Dale Kent has demon-
strated that in the years immediately before 1434 the Medici had forged a
political faction whose members, by and large, she has been able to identi-
fy. The palleschi, as the Medici faction was known, having succeeded where
other political alliances before had failed, exerted their influence through-
out Florence, enabling Cosimo to become a patron whose influence extend-
ed throughout the entire city. Even so, it is important to emphasize both the
similarities and differences between the Medicean faction and other pre —
and post-1434 similar alliances. In the concluding section of this essay, I
briefly touch upon these two themes: the extent to which the Medici relied
on traditional structures of political patronage in Florence; and the reasons
which might help one explain Cosimo’ success in creating a citywide net-
work of patronage.
The association of the Medici family with the gonfalon Lion d’Oro can
be traced to the mid-fourteenth century, when Cosimo’ grandfather moved
to the popolo of San Lorenzo from that of San Tommaso.* Quickly, the
4 Ibid., no. 331, Tommaso Soderini in Florence to Bartolomeo Cederni in Pisa, 22

November 1447: «I° à auto 2 tua e à ’nteso il tuo bisogno, e òne fatto e farò quanto mi sara
possibile, e fo-llo volentieri e da’ mme sanza tua lettera. Ora jo non dirò altro sopra cid».
© Ibid., no. 545, Domenicho di Guasparre Simoni in Terzano to Bartolomeo Cederni in
Florence, 23 October 1453: «... dove jo ti priegho che quando Tomaso si sta in sulla piazza e
chosi Francesco Masini e se fia chomodo el parlare che tu adoperi lui mi gli raghomandi....»
* For an overview of the history of the Medici family in the fourteenth century, see
Brucker (1957), 1-26. NA, M 569 (1458-60), ff. 106r-109v, 112r-113r, 114r-117v, 120r-121r
includes a series of acts dated November-December 1459, which indicate that the Medici
had retained their patronage in the church of San Tommaso.
Medici distinguished themselves as leading members of their gonfalon,

which was the largest, most populous, and probably the wealthiest of the
city’s sixteen administrative units. Of the thirteen meetings of the gonfalon,
for which records have been found for the years 1399-1427, Giovanni di
Bicci was present in nine, always listed among the very first in attendance.
His standing among his neighbors is reflected in the fact that five of the six
times during those years, when the gonfalon appointed syndics to supervise
the collection of back taxes and the confiscation of goods belonging to tax
delinquents, Giovanni was one of these officials.* Of the Medici clients
whom Dale Kent has identified, even at the time when the Medicean fac-
tion had been fully articulated, no fewer than one-fourth lived in Lion
d’Oro, and as many as another fourth in adjoining gonfalons.# That Cosi-
mo cultivated this network of associations with the arzici of Lion d’Oro,
and that, in turn, those wishing to curry favor with the Medici were aware
of this situation are facts neatly reflected in a letter written by Piero da
Gagliano to Cosimo” son, Piero, in June 1448. Like the Medici hailing from
the Mugello, Piero da Gagliano was residing in Naples, and had recently
decided to settle in Florence. He was now writing to the Medici asking that
they purchase for him, for a price which he left to their discretion and
which he promised immediately to repay them, the house of Baldassare di
Luigi da Prato «because the proximity of the house to yours renders this a
very advantageous location».
The Medici patronage of the church of San Lorenzo, and Cosimo’
sponsorship of the construction of the church’s cappella maggiore after 1442
can be largely explained by the long-standing association between that
church and the gonfalon Lion d’Oro. Traditionally, the gonfalon’s syndics
also assumed responsibility for appointing the church’s overseers (operaz),
and supervising in a general way the church’s finances. In March 1405, for
example, Cosimo’s father, Giovanni, had been one of the district’ s three
syndics with responsibility to appoint the operai of San Lorenzo and the
officials to collect back taxes. In the 1410s, for reasons which are unclear
47 NA, B 742, ff. 11r-12r, 16 May 1399; M 265 (1404-17), 4th bundle, ff. 69r-70r, 20
November 1412; M 546 (1421-26), ff. 102r-v, 10 June 1425; ff. 137r-138r, 8 August 1426; B
748, ff. 133r-v, 23 March 1404/5.
48 Kent (1978).
4° MAP XI, 552, Piero da Gagliano in Naples to Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence,
17 June 1448: «... perchè la chasa è in luogho molto chomodo per essere presso a voi... e del
preggio tutto rimetto in voi che meglio chonosciete il mio bisognio di me».
50 NA, B 748, ff. 133r-v, 13 March 1404/5: meeting of the gonfalon Lion d’Oro in the
church of San Lorenzo. Matteo di Nuccio Solosmei, gonfaloniere di compagnia, Giovanni di
Bicci de’ Medici and Niccolao di Ugolino Martelli, members of the dodici buonomini
to me, the church’s prior and canons petitioned directly the Signoria of Flo-
rence to appoint such overseers, but, in this case as well, the s¢gzor7 select-
ed as operai prominent residents of Lion d’Oro, Giovanni di Bicci among
them.?! But even after the fire which destroyed the old church, and the
launching of the project to rebuild a new and more grandiose edifice, the
gonfalon, as a corporation, assumed the responsibility of financing and
oversecing the project. Thus, in 1427, syndics were appointed to collect the
district’s back taxes with which to defray, in part, the construction of the
cappella maggiore, a responsibility Lion d’Oro shared with the church’s
prior and canons.” And thirteen years later, after construction was inter-
rupted because of the financial crisis of the 1430s, the prior of San Loren-
zo appealed directly to the gonfalon for permission to seek out an individ-
ual willing to assume the financial responsibility of bringing the project to
its conclusion.”
When nearly two years later arrangements between the prior and Cosi-
mo were completed, Cosimo was granted patronage rights over the
church’s cappella maggiore and the central nave, and in exchange he was
granted exclusive rights of erecting his coat of arms in those parts of the
church. He, in turn, promised to have this work completed within six
appointed as syndics. The men of the gonfalon, «advertentes quod utile est pro dicta eccle-
sia Sancti Laurentii quod eligantur et constituantur certi operarii, maxime qui exigant omnes
pecunie quantitatibus debitas ecclesie, etc., omni modo etc., eligerunt dictum Matteum,
Johannem et Nicholaum, presentes etc., ad eligendum et nominandum tres vel quatuor syn-
dicos et procuratores pro dicto vexillo qui possint pro dicto vexillo imponere residuum et
exigere etc. et acquirere mutuo etc. circa duodecim prestantias presentis distributionis quin-
quinarum. Et qui habuerunt baliam etc. pro faciendo etc. circa dictos quatuor operario...».
>! PR, 105, ff. 311r-312r, 20 February 1415/16: The following six inhabitants of the gon-
falon, together with the prior of the church of San Lorenzo appointed operarzi for the fol-
lowing three years: Vieri di Andrea Rondinelli, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Ugo di Andrea
della Stufa, Filippo di messer Biagio de’ Guasconi, Nerone di Nigio di Nerone, and Loren-
zo di Andrea, beccarius.
? NA, M 546 (1427-46), ff. 7r-v, 27 November 1427: The men of the gonfalon of Lion
d’Oro appoint syndics charged with collecting the gonfalon’s debts and paying its obliga-
tions. «Residuo vero dictarum pecuniarum exigendarum ut supra per dictos sindicos et seu
que ad eorum manibus pervenient in futuro, factis primo solutionis suprascriptis et restitu-
tionis ut supra dictum est et non prius possint et debeant dicti sindici et operarii expendere
et expendi facere in muramento et constructione maioris cappelle dicte ecclesie S. Lauren-
til et pro ipsius constructionis que cappella fit per populanos dicte ecclesie et eo modo et
forma prout eis videbitur et placebit et in hoc eorum conscientias honerandum.»
? Ginori Conti (1940), Appendix V, published the notarial document referring to this
meeting, without realizing, however, that this was a deliberation of the gonfalon Lion d’Oro.
The archival reference for the document is: NA, C525 (1437-55), ff. 60r-61r, 20 November
1440. Only a few days after this decision, Cosimo donated to the Church of San Lorenzo a
piece of property valued at about 400 florins: NA, A 663, ff. 1r-2v, 2 December 1440.
years.* Thus, Cosimo officially took over a responsibility which had

belonged to the collegiality of the gonfalon, and in an expressly tangible
manner established his supremacy in the district of his residence.
If Cosimo’ power base in his gonfalon resembled that of several other
political bosses, it is undeniable that he wielded more power and influence
than any contemporary Florentine. Even a casual examination of his epis-
tolary reveals the range of his political patronage and the variety of clients
appealing to him for the most diverse types of assistance. A systematic
analysis of the more than 1230 extant letters addressed to him reveals that
almost 70 percent contain appeals for favors of sorts, ranging from pleas for
small loans to requests for his intercession with the Pope for the granting of
lucrative ecclesiastical benefices.* The largest group of letters, almost one
of every five (19.53 percent, to be precise), asked for favors which Cosimo
could honor by addressing himself to a local magistracy: foreigners advanc-
ing their candidacy for one of the judicial posts in the communal or guild
governments open only to non-Florentines; Florentines pleading that they
be considered for an office in the contado or distretto, or that their tax
assessments be diminished. Significantly, the second largest group contains
requests for Cosimo’s intercession with the Pope: nearly 15 percent of his
correspondence falls in this category. An additional eighty-odd letters (ca.
6.5 percent of the total) appealed for Cosimo’s help with other ecclesiasti-
cal officials, so that nearly a total of one-fifth of his correspondents wrote
to him hoping to receive favors from important church bureaucrats. The
third largest category, nearly one of ten letters, involved favors obtained
either in the courts of condottiert, such as Francesco Sforza, the Duke of
Urbino, and others, or in those of foreign governments, Venice, Naples,
Ferrara, and after 1450, Milan. Two other substantial groups of letters
include pleas for personal assistance (loans, cash grants with which to fund
dowries of poor girls or subsidize ecclesiastical institutions, pleas to arrange
marriages, to lend manuscripts from his library, etc.) and, finally, undefined
requests, to be explained to Cosimo by the letter’s bearer.
This most cursory analysis of the contents of Cosimo’s correspondence
offers a hint about the sources of his extraordinary power and influence.
Cosimo’s power in Florence, it appears, depended overwhelmingly on the
contacts — friendships, acquaintances, and business relations — which
through the years he had acquired outside of Florence. It is difficult to con-
4 Ginori Conti (1940), Appendix VI; the original in: NA, I 9 (1442-43), ff. 40r-42v, 13
August 1442. h
5 Nearly 1,000 letters of Cosimo are found in MAP XI and XII. The rest of his corre-
spondence is dispersed throughout other volumes of MAP; in a very few cases I have been
able to locate some of his letters in other documentary collections.
te FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
vey adequately in brief the extent to which Cosimo — and with time his two
sons and his nephew as well — had become the clearing house, the center
of an information network through which requests for all sorts of favors
were channelled. Quite obviously, the influence which he was in a position
to exert has been most frequently detected in his city’s internal policies, in
his ability to command the respect and arouse the fear of many of his com-
patriots. What, perhaps, has not been sufficiently emphasized, is the extent
to which, unlike any of his powerful contemporaries, Cosimo enjoyed a
range of patronage and influence which they simply could not hope to
match. Cosimo’s standing amongst the most powerful Italian personages of
his age was well known in his day. The Doge Foscari, 70 sento è molto vostro
amico, wrote Andrea Mapheo, a Veronese stranded in Budapest, wishing
permission to settle in Venice. Alamanno Salviati knew that Cosimo had
influence (...j0 so quello che tu puoj in lui...) with Giovanni Vitelleschi, car-
dinal of Florence,” while Savese di Francesco, writing from Perugia, asked
for a favor with a well-known mercenary, Troilo, who, he knew, «is yours
and you can dispose of him as if he were in your household» (é vostro e de
luy desponete per senpre come de niunno de caxa vostra). And Alexander
Tagliamillo, wishing to bring to the Pope’s attention as a candidate for the
archbishopric of Salerno his relative, Messer Niccola Tagliamillo, wrote to
Cosimo, knowing that he wielded much influence with the Pope (szete assay
cho’ lo nostro Signore Santto Padre). Examples such as these could be mul-
tiplied, for the bulk of Cosimo’s correspondents wrote to him precisely
because he wielded influence with the men of power in Italy.
This ability, the capacity to reach out into the major sources of Italian
patronage, endowed Cosimo with prestige and power unrivalled by any
Florentine political boss. The Soderini, the Pitti, the Capponi, the Rucellai,
the Acciaioli, and other prominent Florentines of Cosimo’s generation
could exert their patronage within a fairly limited radius: the gonfalon and
the region of the contado, where they had their landed possessions above
all, while occasionally they enjoyed a certain standing with a prelate or a
lord. But none could rival Cosimo, for none had available that formidable
instrument of Medici power: the Medici bank. It would be difficult to exag-
gerate tha political benefit derived by the Medici from their bank. While
exiled in Venice, Cosimo and his brother offered to advance a huge loan
(about 30,000 florins) to the Venetian government, an offer gratefully
°° MAP XI, 161, Andreas Mapheus, Veronese in Buda to Cosimo in Florence, 3 March
1438.
7 MAP, XII, 159, Alamanno Salviati, Capitano of Pistoia to Cosimo, 24 October 1435.
* MAP, XI, 83, Savese di Francesco in Perugia to Cosimo, 4 January 1436/37.
” MAP, XI, 315, Alexander Tagliamillo in Naples to Cosimo, 20 July 1439.
accepted by his hosts. Francesco Sforza’s fortunes depended to no small

degree on Cosimo” willingness to finance him directly; and the Medici
position in the Roman court has been too well described by Raymond de
Roover to require additional elaboration here.” The example of Roberto da
Gagliano, an amico of the Medici, rather graphically shows how Cosimo’s
financial resources could be marshalled on his clients’ behalf. In his Cata-
sto return, amended around 1430, Roberto declared: «I began a bank...
with 500 florins advanced to me by Cosimo, which he held and deposited
for me. I now find myself a creditor in this bank for 2,713 florins and 6,633
lire di piccioli.» Thus, Roberto, it seems, was given a line of credit in the
Medici bank; with this credit he launched a series of financial operations
from which he stood to gain, according to his own tax declaration, nearly
3,700 florins.® The point is, that because of the bank and the political
Shortly after his arrival in Vénice, Cosimo was authorized by the Venetian government
to negotiate with Niccolò de’ Fortebracci, a leading mercenary of the day, on behalf of the
Venetians. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Secreta, XIU, ff. 43r-v, 24 january 1433/34.
The offer to advance a loan to the Venetian government was reported by one contemporary
chronicler and is referred to in a letter sent by a Venetian to one of Cosimo’s relatives. MAP,
IV, 331, Jacomo Donado fu di messer Polo in Venice to Francesco di Giuliano de’ Medici in
Florence, 11 September 1434: «Io son zertissimo che avanti el zionzer haverete sapudo de la
magnificha oferta che fe’ Choximo e Lorenzo a la nostra Signoria da doverli in prestar per
quanto tenpo piaxese a la nostra Signoria e darli adesso ducati trenta milia... La nostra Sig-
noria l’à regraziadi e ha habudo per azeto la oferta sua.... Queste son gran chosse e magni-
fiche chose, et està molto azeta a tuta questa tera questa soa offerta.. », Sanudo refers to a
15,000 florin loan advanced by Cosimo to the Venetian government; cited in Gutkind
(1940), 117. In this context it may be interesting to cite the judgement of two of Cosimo’s
contemporaries. Landucci (1883), 3, so described Cosimo: «Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici,
el quale si chiamava da tutto ’] mondo el gran mercante, ch’aveva le ragioni per tutto l’abi-
tato; non si poteva fare maggiore comparazione che dire: e’ ti par essere Cosimo de’ Medici:
quasi dicendo: che non si poteva trovare el maggiore ricco e più famoso... », and Rucellai
(1960), 54, says: «Cosimo de’ Medici, ricchissimo più che messer Palla [de’ Strozzi], valen-
tissimo di naturale et d’ingegnio quanto niun altro che avessi mai la nostra cipttà. E aveva
tal seguito e tale concorso nella cipttà che si dicie che mai non fu niuno cipttadino maggiore
di lui, et della città e del governo disponeva chome era di suo piaciere».
61 Pietribuoni, Priorista (BNF, Conventi Soppressi, C. 4.895, f. 151r): «Al tempo de’ detti
Signori [January-February 1448/49] si donò al conte Francesco Isforga f. venticinque migli-
aia perchè potessi aquistare Milano, benchè da Chosimo de’ Medici n’aveva auto f. 50 migli-
aia in presto, e da’ genovesi fiorini dieci mila donatogli pelli sua bisogni».
2 De Roover (1963), ch. 9.
5 Catasto 296 (Aggiunte di secondi e terzi ufficiali), £. 137r: «Giovanni et Ruberto d’An-
tonio da Galiano, (gonfalon Lion d’Oro)... Principiaj un banco jo Ruberto detto con f. 500
mi servì Cosimo de’ Medici che per me li tenne et dipositò, nel quale bancho mi truovo avere
a riscuotere f. 2713 d’oro e lire 6,633 di piccioli». By converting the lire to florins at the rate
of 4.2 lire/florin (for the current rate of conversion, see Molho [1971], 213) one obtains the
figure of 1,579 florins; 1,579 + 2,713 — 500 = 3,792.
power which they derived from it, the Medici range of patronage far
exceeded that of any other Florentine. If their rivals and competitors were
bosses of their neighborhoods, the Medici had become patrons on a much
vaster scale, which encompassed Florence’s domain and often other parts
of Italy. Eminent politicians themselves had to rely on Cosimo’s good favors
when establishing their contacts with foreign powerful lords. Conversely,
the rewards conferred on faithful Medici clients and followers far exceed-
ed whatever recompense could be reaped by followers of other political
leaders. Thus, for example, shortly after Cosimo financed Francesco
Sforza’s successful takeover, members of the Acciaioli and the Della Stufa
families, old political allies of the Medici, made their appearance in the
Milanese court, fast gaining the new sigrore’s favor by obtaining choice
positions in the Milanese provincial bureaucracy.”
This short essay examined three aspects of Florentine political experience
which cast some light upon Cosimo’s extraordinary position after his return
from exile. Starting with the title pater patriae, it was suggested that this term
reinforces modern idealist conceptions of the state which are inadequate to
explain the structure of Florentine politics. The honor posthumously grant-
ed to Cosimo has to be understood as the recognition bestowed upon him by
his admiring peers whose social and political ideals, in most fundamental
respects, Cosimo had shared. The title itself might be seen as part of a con-
tinuing effort to create a political mythology at whose center stood Cosimo’s
persona. Repeatedly, in the thirty years following his death, Cosimo’s exam-
ple was invoked as the paragon of those virtues of self-control, generosity,
and strength of character, which members of the Florentine aristocracy
ascribed to themselves. When Cosimo’s great-grandson, Piero, was exiled in
1494 and a new political regime created in Florence, the priors of the city
ordered that the title pater patriae, inscribed on Cosimo’s tomb, be effaced
for, so the decree states, he could better be described as a tyrannus than as
A Storia di Milano (1955), VII, 20, n.1, for the Della Stufa; for the Acciaioli, Pietribuoni,
Priorista, £. 152r. See also Benedetto Accolti’s explicit letter to his patron Piero di messer
Luigi Guicciardini, written on 3 September 1435. MAP XII, 30, Benedetto d’Areco, dottore
di leggie in Volterra to Piero Guicciardini in Florence: «Qua tutti ci ano disposti per la vos-
tra lettera nella mia raferma per sei mesi, se non che Cosomo, a cui instantia fu eletto uno
messer T'homaso da Castiglione, scrisse una lettera loro, tanto stretta, che il fatto mio rimase
indietro. Anno mandata l’alectione a Cosomo che il detto messer Tomaso possa venire per
tutto Ottobre et me vogliono rafermare in sino alla sua venuta; per questo pocho tempo non
voglio acectare, salvo se non credessi stare insino a Ognisanti. Se vedete potere contentare
Cosomo che faccia indusgiare per questi due mesi l’are’ caro, avisandolo ch’ io non so’ meno
suo servidore che messer Thomaso». The fact that this letter is now today in the Medici
archives most probably indicates that Piero Guicciardini did try to intervene on his client’s
behalf with Cosimo.
the father of his fatherland. A new regime, supported by new social forces
and political alliances, was now in need of forging its own ideology.
On the basis of evidence that suggests rather than proves the point, I
then argued, following Cohn, that the Florentine urban workers and the
poor, crushed by the aristocratic regime installed in 1382, were forced in
the Quattrocento to redefine the focus of their social experience, abandon-
ing their collectivist impulses, and organizing themselves at the neighbor-
hood and parish level. But this fragmentation does not appear to have pro-
duced those “vertical” ties of association between “upper and lower
orders” of society which some historians detect in Quattrocento Florence.
In this sense, the exploitation of Florentine workers by their employers was
not attenuated either by ties of clientage, or by paternalistic behavior of
their social superiors, for these attitudes are not reflected in the relations
between the rich and the poor in Renaissance Florence. The constant
employment of force, the exemplary and frequent punishment of those
tempted to violate the social order, perhaps even the regulation of wheat
prices, ultimately these were the political instruments through which the
workers and the poor were kept in their place.
Patronage, on the other hand, was an institution which regulated the
relations of members of the political class: those men who could deliver
small favors by serving in communal office, who could constantly convey
useful information about events taking place in Florence or abroad, and
who could constantly defend the good name, the reputation and honor of
their patron. Patronage had to do with politics, a notion well expressed by
Dietisalvi Neroni, himself one of Florence’s great political bosses, in a let-
ter to Cosimo” son Piero: Amicitia, he wrote, «is useful and necessary in all
things, and, as you know, above all, in politics».°° And in another letter, this
one addressed to Cosimo, Franco di Rosso, writing from Naples, asked for
a letter of presentation to a powerful figure in the Neapolitan court «for the
greater a man is the greater his need of support and of amzici».°’
6 Muntz (1888), 104, where the deliberation of the priors and colleges of 22 November
1495 is quoted as follows: «Deliberaverunt quod inscriptio sepulchri Cosme de Medicis in
ede Sancti Laurentii in pavimento prope altare majus, cujus talis est titulus: Cosmae Medici
patri patriae: omnino deleatur, quia talis titulus non meruit sed potius tirannus». I wish to
thank Mrs. Janice Clearfield, doctoral candidate in Art History at Brown University, for hav-
ing very kindly brought this document to my attention.
6 MAP CXXXVII, 596, Dietisalvi Neroni in Scarperia to Piero di Cosimo in Florence,
1 April no year: «... in qualunche cosa l’amicitia è utile et necessaria, et maxime ne gli stati,
chome a’ tte è noto».
6 MAP XII, 52, Franco di Rosso in Naples to Cosimo in Florence, 13 September 1435:
«... quanto l’uomo è magiore tanto 4 magiore bisongnio di sostengnio e d’amici». Arlotto,
If the metaphor pater patriae conveys an inadequate and largely false pic-
ture of Cosimo’s position in Florentine society, might his political role be
reflected in another image more suitable to the interpretation advanced in
the second half of this paper? The answer to this question has already been
offered in this essay’s title: Cosimo as padrino, as the political patron, the
go-between whose contacts and friendships with his powerful contempo-
raries enabled him to honor the requests of his supplicants and by so doing
earned their support and devotion. Power, in the end, belonged to him not
because of force, nor because of his control of the electoral processes, but,
rather, because he had created a political machine which made it possible
for him to award those who cooperated with him and his associates much
more generously than could any other Florentine of his day.
Facezie, 174, n. 113, seems to be saying much the same thing when he advises his listeners
to amass only a moderate amount of wealth and not to aspire to great riches. Those whose
yearly income exceeds 100 florins have many preoccupations, among which: «arete a stare
sottoposto a maggiore numero di gente...».
- A shortened version of this paper was read at the 1976 meeting of the American His-
torical Association in Washington, D.C. I wish to express my gratitude to the late William
Church and to my colleague Abbott Gleason for their helpful suggestions.
4.
TRE CITTÀ-STATO E I LORO DEBITI PUBBLICI.
OUPRSITLE IPO TESESULEASTORLA DI RIRENZE,
GENOVA E VENEZIA”
Per Marvin Becker
Mi sono chiesto se il quesito implicito nel sottotitolo del nostro conve-

gno, «crisi, trasformazione, sviluppo», possa essere posto anche nell’ambi-
to di un'indagine sulla storia fiscale dell’Italia tra la metà del 14° e del 15°
secolo. Una risposta in qualche modo adeguata richiederebbe una presen-
tazione molto più approfondita di quanto non sia consentito in questa sede,
e una conoscenza di fonti, di bibliografia, e di problemi storiografici ben
più vasta di quanto non sia la mia. Mi sono permesso, perciò, di restringe-
re drasticamente il tema assegnatomi dagli organizzatori del nostro incon-
tro. Mi occuperei quindi non di sistemi fiscali come è indicato nel pro-
gramma, ma di debito pubblico, e non dell’Italia, ma piuttosto di tre città —
Firenze, Genova, Venezia — ben note nella storiografia tardo medievale
anche per le complicate vicende dei loro debiti pubblici. Date le mie com-
petenze, la maggioranza degli esempi ai quali farò riferimento provengono
dal caso di Firenze, anche se cercherò di illustrare tendenze generali con
esempi tratti dalla storia delle altre due città.
Oltre queste precisazioni, c'è da chiedersi con quali criteri nell’ambito
della gestione e del cambiamento che sicuramente si intravedono nella storia
di questi tre organismi fiscali sia possibile misurare crisi, trasformazione e svi-
luppo. Senza volere addentrarmi nella polemica ben nota, e forse in qualche
modo ormai superata, tra chi, come Enrico Fiumi, Roberto Lopez, e David
Herlihy, ha sostenuto che proprio nell’arco di tempo che a noi interessa si
verificò una crisi profonda nell’economia e nella società italiana, e chi, — Carlo
Cipolla, Federigo Melis, Richard Goldthwaite tra gli altri — ha sostenuto una
‘ L'amico dott. Giovanni Ciappelli mi ha, una volta ancora, aiutato a rendere il testo di
questa relazione in un italiano accettabile. A lui va il mio profondo senso di riconoscenza. Si
avverte che le note che seguono si limitano ad offrire i riferimenti essenziali, sia alla biblio-
grafia esistente che alla documentazione inedita. L'autore si ripromette di sviluppare i temi
qui trattati in una monografia più ampia sui rapporti tra fiscalità e stato nella storia dei
comuni italiani del basso medioevo.
no FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
tesi del tutto opposta, mi chiedo quale possa essere il metro adatto per
determinare se la storia dei debiti pubblici delle tre città qui prese in consi-
derazione fu soggetta a meri cambiamenti, trasformazioni inevitabili nel
tempo, oppure ad uno sviluppo, termine che in qualche modo implica l’esi-
stenza di una crescita e maturazione, un avvicinarsi a forme più efficaci e per-
fezionate. Alcuni interrogativi possono rendere più chiara la questione. Un
ipotetico allargamento del debito pubblico di una di queste città nell’arco di
tempo qui preso in esame dovrebbe essere considerato un segno di matura-
zione e sviluppo, oppure al contrario un segno di indebolimento? Oppure,
ancora, come interpretare un maggior coinvolgimento di una parte della
popolazione (possidenti, ceti meno abbienti, o enti religiosi e caritativi) nelle
vicende del debito pubblico? Prendiamo il caso di Andrea Barbarigo, mer-
cante veneziano della metà del 15° secolo, ben documentato da Frederic
Lane. Nel corso della sua vita, Barbarigo sembra avere evitato con cura di
investire nel debito pubblico, mentre suo figlio Niccolò, alla fine del secolo,
ammoniva con una certa insistenza i suoi figli a non alienare i crediti del debi-
to pubblico che aveva accumulato nel corso della sua vita.? Questo cambia-
mento di atteggiamento è da mettere in relazione con una forma di sviluppo
o con una trasformazione, complessa in certi sensi ma in altri abbastanza
semplice da capire, nelle strutture economiche e sociali della Serenissima?
Poste così, queste sono domande quasi metastoriche, di competenza di
economisti, piuttosto che di storici. In fin dei conti, mentre noi storici siamo
perfettamente capaci di fare una serie di accertamenti necessari per le nostre
ricerche — stabilire tendenze secolari, identificare istituzioni, meccanismi,
prezzi, tassi di sconto, ammontare dei fondi creati per estinguere debiti e
così via — ci mancano strumenti teorici per valutare la logica interna di una
serie di fenomeni, e i loro effetti sui rapporti economici e sul tessuto sociale.
Non voglio soffermarmi sulle dimensioni metodologiche di questo proble-
ma, ma mi pare opportuno presentare esplicitamente il criterio che userò per
rispondere, alla fine della mia presentazione, alle domande poste poc'anzi.
Dai tempi di Adam Smith, fino ai giorni nostri, molti filosofi ed economisti
si sono interessati alle funzioni economiche e sociali dei debiti pubblici. Esi-
ste, perciò, una vasta scelta di ipotesi, di conclusioni, e di intuizioni ovvia-
mente non facilmente conciliabili tra di loro sulle quali basarsi per i nostri
scopi.’ Nell’adottare una di queste prospettive, mi sono soffermato non sulle
' Due recenti tentativi di offrire una visione d’insieme di questo dibattito sono: BrownJ.
(1989), e Molho (1990).
2 Lane (1944), 34, 38.
? Un elenco (senza molti approfondimenti) delle discussioni sulla natura e sulle funzioni
del debito pubblico si trova in Andel (1986).
4. TRE CITTÀ-STATO E I LORO DEBITI PUBBLICI 75)
formulazioni di un economista (formulazioni che spesso richiedono una pre-

parazione tecnica che a me manca) ma piuttosto sulle intuizioni di uno sta-
tista inglese, capo del partito liberale del secolo scorso. Fu infatti William
Gladstone, Primo Ministro e moralista dell’epoca vittoriana, che, discuten-
do di fiscalità, scrisse che «i bilanci generali non sono solo materia di calco-
li aritmetici, ma in mille modi vanno alla radice della prosperità delle perso-
ne, ai rapporti tra le classi sociali, e alla potenza dei regni». Ecco, allora, un
criterio sulla base del quale misurare la trasformazione ed il possibile svi-
luppo dei debiti pubblici tardo-medievali: appurare la misura entro la quale,
tra la crisi della metà del Trecento e l’altra crisi alla fine del Quattrocento,
essi influirono sulla prosperità delle persone, sui rapporti tra le classi socia-
li, e sulla potenza delle città-stato (non trattandosi nei nostri casi di regni).
Prima di affrontare i temi suggeriti dalla seconda parte della citazione di
Gladstone, dovremmo soffermarci sulla dimensione quantitativa del nostro
tema, l’aritmetica per dirla con l’uomo politico inglese. Il punto di parten-
za qui è un fenomeno che, tertamente, non si riferisce solo all'Italia del
medioevo, ma che è stato una costante di molti paesi europei fino all’età
moderna: una scelta ideologica e culturale che faceva sì che i governi faces-
sero ricorso, per rispondere alle loro esigenze finanziarie, all’esazione di
imposte indirette anziché di imposte dirette.” Dovunque ci si volga in Ita-
lia, come in Germania, nelle Fiandre, o in Francia ci si imbatte press’a poco
nello stesso fenomeno. Con l'aumento delle spese che ogni governo dovet-
te affrontare dalla metà del 13° secolo, le entrate ordinarie non furono più
sufficienti a coprirne il fabbisogno. Mentre in Francia, là dove il governo
monarchico si era meglio consolidato, si imposero anche sistemi di imposta
diretta (la ¢azlle), in Italia (e in quelle zone della Germania e dei Paesi Bassi
dove prevalsero forme di governo urbano, soprattutto in città dominate da
oligarchie imprenditoriali) la tassazione diretta sugli abitanti della città
dominante fu accuratamente evitata, mentre fu accordata una preferenza
marcata all’istituzione di prestiti, che dovevano supplire all’insufficienza
degli introiti delle imposte indirette. (In termini attuali è quello che avver-
rebbe se un governo evitasse con ogni mezzo l’imposizione di tasse sui red-
diti e sulla proprietà, e per coprire il proprio fabbisogno si basasse sull IVA
e sulla vendita, volontaria o forzata, dei BOT).
È importante soffermarci su questo punto, perché altrimenti una buona
parte della storia fiscale degli ultimi due secoli del medioevo risulta diffici-
le da capire. Del tutto rappresentativo mi sembra l’atteggiamento di Matteo
Villani quando, in un passo ben noto (viii, 71) della sua Cronica notava:
4 La citazione proviene da O’ Connor (1973), 2.

> Un buon punto di partenza è l’ottimo trattamento di Fryde and Fryde (1963), 430-553.
apparechiandosi molte...novità in Italia, alle quali, per conservare suo stato, neces-
sità era al nostro comune di provvedere; e non potendosi ciò fare senza danari, ed
essendo l’entrate del comune indebitate, e porre di nuovo gravezze senza manife-
sta guerra incomportabile e pericoloso parea... quelli che reggevano il comune cer-
cavano nuovo modo, provvedendo per legge che chi spontaneamente prestasse al
comune fosse scritto a suo creditore nuovamente nell’uno tre.
È interessante notare che né in questa occasione, né in altre, né Villani
né alcun altro dei numerosi cronisti e commentatori tardomedievali (poco
importa se fiorentini o no) ebbe l'immaginazione o l'accortezza di suggeri-
re che, dati gli squilibri ormai cronici e pienamente evidenti tra entrate e
uscite del governo, «quelli che reggevano il governo» avrebbero potuto
supplire ai bisogni delle finanze comunali con l'imposizione di una tassa
diretta. Questa possibilità rimaneva fuori degli orizzonti mentali e della
volontà politica della stragrande maggioranza dei governanti fiorentini,
tranne in momenti storici del tutto eccezionali, come durante la rivolta dei
Ciompi. Infatti, il «nuovo modo» ideato per far fronte alle esigenze fiscali
non era altro che un nuovo e più ingegnoso modo per convincere posses-
sori di risorse liquide a prestare i loro soldi al governo. Solo durante i regi-
mi di Carlo di Calabria e di Gualtieri di Brienne, i due signori che gover-
narono la città per pochi mesi a turno, ci fu un tentativo di modificare il
regime fiscale introducendo una forma di imposta diretta. Il fallimento dei
loro governi finì per far associare, nella mente dei fiorentini, regime politi-
co signorile e regime fiscale basato sulle imposte dirette, e quest’ultimo a
Firenze non fu mai più riproposto, neanche nel secolo successivo.° Stupi-
sce l’insistenza con la quale certi storici hanno continuato ad asserire che il
catasto fu un'imposta diretta.” Il catasto non fu che un modo più sistema-
tico e preciso di ripartire il peso delle prestanze, e di cercare di colpire
forme di ricchezza che era stato più facile occultare alle autorità fiscali
prima del 1427.8 (Aggiungerei qui che il titolo scelto da Elio Conti per il
suo bellissimo libro mi è sempre sembrato curioso. I fenomeni che lui
descrive con impareggiabile maestria non riguardano tanto la storia del-
l’imposta diretta a Firenze, quanto la storia della crisi del debito pubblico,
crisi, che, è vero, nella seconda metà del 15° secolo, e sotto circostanze
politiche ben precise, costrinse i dirigenti della città a tassare una parte
della rendita derivata da investimenti nel debito pubblico, imponendo per
la prima volta, in modo del tutto circoscritto, e limitato ad una parte sol-
tanto degli introiti di certi cittadini, una tassa diretta. Ma questa è soltanto
6 Barbadoro (1929) e Becker (1967).

7 Day (1983), 355.
* Molho (1971), 79-87; Herlihy et Klapisch (1978), capitolo 2; Conti (1984), cap. 4.
4. TRE CITTÀ-STATO E I LORO DEBITI PUBBLICI 75
una parte, e certo non la maggiore, di una storia molto più complicata che
Conti analizza nel suo bel libro).
In questo campo, la situazione di Firenze è simile a quella di Venezia,
Genova e altre città. Gino Luzzatto, nella prima frase del suo importante
libro sulla storia del debito pubblico veneziano, rilevava la stessa cosa nel-
l'ambito della storia della Serenissima.” Per quanto riguarda Genova, si sa
che una delle riforme contemplate ma abbandonate per la resistenza feroce
da essa incontrata, fu l’effimero tentativo di Simon Boccanegra di imporre
un'imposta diretta, con l’aiuto della quale fornire al governo le risorse
necessarie per il finanziamento del debito pubblico.!° L'esigenza che con-
dusse Boccanegra ad intraprendere questa iniziativa è del tutto comprensi-
bile. Nel 1339 il debito pubblico genovese ammontava a quasi 3.000.000 di
lire, sulle quali il governo si era impegnato a pagare un tasso d’interesse
annuo che variava dal 6 al 10 per cento. Poter contenere questa voce del
bilancio avrebbe comportato un alleggerimento notevole delle spese della
repubblica, ma la fortissima’opposizione costrinse Boccanegra ad abban-
donare il progetto.
In conseguenza di questo atteggiamento diffuso tra le classi dirigenti,
gabelle e prestiti furono sin dall’inizio le pietre miliari dei sistemi fiscali fio-
rentino, genovese e veneziano. Il bisogno urgente di risorse finanziarie con
le quali affrontare tutta una gamma di esigenze della città-stato induceva i
governanti a rastrellare fondi tramite prestiti, volontari o forzosi, richiesti ai
cittadini. Le entrate delle gabelle (le imposte indirette) erano usate per
pagare gli interessi dovuti ai creditori, ed esisteva, quindi, un rapporto
diretto tra la frequenza con la quale il governo si valeva dello strumento dei
prestiti e il peso della tassazione indiretta sopportato dalla popolazione. Un
aspetto che mi preme sottolineare è che questo sistema fiscale rispecchiava
pienamente le strutture sociali e politiche del tempo, nel senso che società
fortemente gerarchizzate non potevano che ideare sistemi fiscali che si tra-
ducevano in una distribuzione enormemente disuguale del peso fiscale. E
ovvio che, sin dal suo inizio, questa distribuzione degli oneri era favorevo-
le ai ceti più ricchi e potenti e discriminava i poveri. Procurarsi il denaro
necessario per pagare gli interessi del debito pubblico già in mano a chi
poteva disporre di risorse finanziarie imponendo tasse che proporzional-
mente colpivano molto più duramente i ceti meno abbienti implicava una
circolazione costante di ricchezza dal basso verso l’alto e un’accentuazione
degli squilibri economici.
C’é ancora un punto sul quale può esser importante soffermarsi breve-
? Luzzatto (1963).
10 Sieveking (1905), I, 126.
mente. Questo insieme di strategie fiscali, cioè il ricorso diffuso a prestiti,

alle imposte indirette per raccogliere il denaro necessario a pagare gli inte-
ressi e a tasse dirette imposte ai residenti del contado e delle città soggetto,
era piuttosto comune in molte città, italiane e non. Per finanziarsi, i gover-
ni si rivolgevano anche a prestatori stranieri, di solito importanti personag-
gi o governanti di regimi signorili, che erano contenti di depositare i loro
capitali presso i debiti pubblici di importanti città commerciali. E probabi-
le che una particolarità delle tre città di cui ci stiamo occupando sia stata la
loro capacità di rastrellare il denaro liquido necessario alle loro esigenze
all’interno delle loro economie, e di non doversi valere, almeno massiccia-
mente, di capitali stranieri. Qui il confronto con certe situazioni d'Oltralpe
sembra assai significativo. Nel 14° secolo, ben il 60 per cento del debito
consolidato di Magonza (un debito creato dalla vendita di rendite perpe-
tue) era in mano a stranieri, mentre la cifra analoga per quanto riguarda il
debito di Douai si aggirava sul 50 per cento. A Brema e ad Amburgo, dove
verso la fine del quindicesimo secolo fu fatto uso notevole di finanziamenti
deficitari, una buona parte del debito pubblico era in mano ai cittadini di
Lubecca, i quali, dopo la crisi dell'economia anseatica, avevano investito
considerevoli porzioni dei loro capitali in rendite di queste due città. Ma
anche a Milano, verso la metà del 15° secolo, una buona parte dei credito-
ri dello stato erano banchieri non milanesi, mentre la capacità dei ceti
governanti locali di fornire le risorse liquide necessarie al governo si rivelò
assai modesta.!!
Il contrasto con i tre casi qui presi in considerazione è notevole. Anche
se, a causa delle nostre conoscenze attuali, è difficile proporre delle statisti-
che riassuntive, è assai chiaro che la stragrande maggioranza del valore dei
tre debiti pubblici che ci interessano fu in mano a cittadini o enti locali. Agli
inizi del Quattrocento, è probabile che a Firenze non molto più di 300-
400.000 fiorini di un debito consolidato che superava i 3 milioni di fiorini
fosse posseduto da stranieri! I dati disponibili per Venezia e per Genova
indicherebbero situazioni analoghe. Ciò non vuol dire che questi investi-
menti non fossero economicamente rilevanti per gli importanti personaggi
a cui fu permesso di investire somme più che rispettabili nei debiti pubbli-
ci di una di queste città (tra i molti casi, spiccano quelli dei Visconti a Geno-
va, del marchese di Mantova a Venezia, del Papa Condulmer e del re del
Portogallo a Firenze); né tanto meno si vuole suggerire che, in momenti
particolari, i governi di queste tre città non fecero sforzi cospicui per atti-
'' Le cifre per le città del nord Europa si trovano in Fryde and Fryde (1963), e per Mila-
no in Chittolini (1977).
2 Molho (1971), p. 72, n. 10, da integrare con Conti (1984), p. 31, n. 4.
4. TRE CITTÀ-STATO E I LORO DEBITI PUBBLICI ait
rare capitali dall’estero. Piuttosto, il punto che sembra opportuno stabilire

è che, in contrasto con molte altre località e situazioni politiche, nei casi di
Firenze, Genova e Venezia, la storia del debito pubblico ci porta a consi-
derare prevalentemente problemi di storia interna, dei rapporti politici ed
economici instauratisi in quelle città, mentre lo stesso non mi sembra si
possa affermare per altri governi dell’epoca e per i loro debiti.
A metà del Trecento, questo modello aveva già un secolo di vita. I debi-
ti pubblici di Venezia e di Genova erano stati consolidati verso la metà del
Duecento, e quello fiorentino seguì la stessa sorte negli anni Quaranta del
secolo successivo. Nel periodo precedente al loro consolidamento, i debiti
delle tre città erano considerati estinguibili, nel senso che dopo l’emergen-
za che seguiva l'imposizione di prestiti, i creditori erano generalmente rim-
borsati dei loro capitali. Dopo il loro consolidamento, tranne casi se non del
tutto eccezionali certamente non comuni, questi debiti erano considerati
non estinguibili, ed un investimento (volontario o forzoso) diventava equi-
valente ad una rendita perpetua, trasferibile sia nella sua parte del capitale
che in quella degli interessi su di esso dovuti, ma comunque, non estingui-
bile. Sarebbe interessante poter misurare l'ammontare di questi debiti con-
solidati confrontandoli con valori — prodotto interno lordo, reddito pro
capite, ecc. — che possano offrire un’idea più precisa del peso che quei
debiti ebbero nelle economie locali. Per ragioni ovvie, questo non è possi-
bile.
Quello che invece è possibile fare, anche se solo in modo molto impre-
ciso, è misurare il rapporto tra ammontare del debito e popolazione delle
tre città. Secondo calcoli assai approssimativi, nei primi anni Quaranta del
Trecento, il Monte veneziano ammontava a ca. 420.000 fiorini, le Compere
genovesi ad una cifra più di sette volte maggiore, sui 3.000.000 di lire, ed il
Monte fiorentino si aggirava intorno a 500.000 fiorini. Gli interessi dovuti
ai creditori rispecchiavano queste cifre: circa 21.000 fiorini annui a Venezia,
ca. 240.000 lire a Genova (dove non solo il debito era notevolmente più alto
che nelle altre due città, ma dove, anche, il tasso d’interesse annuo promes-
so ai creditori si aggirava su una media dell’8 per cento rispetto alla media
del 5 per cento che prevaleva a Firenze e a Venezia), e ca. 25.000 fiorini a
Firenze. Quello che colpisce in queste cifre è la modestia del debito pub-
blico veneziano, in confronto a quelli di Firenze e di Genova, risultato di
una politica seguita dal governo veneziano nella prima metà del secolo di
ammortizzare una parte del suo debito. Con una popolazione che eccedeva
di molto i 100.000 abitanti, e probabilmente si avvicinava al doppio di que-
sta cifra, il rapporto debito / popolazione a Venezia era di circa 2,8 fiorini
pro capite, e la media a testa della cifra sborsata ogni anno dal governo per
gli interessi del debito si aggirava sui 2-3 soldi. Diversa era la situazione
genovese, dove una popolazione che non era neanche la metà di quella
We FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
veneziana era chiamata a sopportare un debito ben più grande, che rag-
giungeva un valore medio di più di 22 fiorini a testa, ed una ripartizione
degli interessi annui di ca. 3 fiorini per ogni abitante della città. A Firenze,
si constata una situazione intermedia, dove la popolazione di ca. 90.000 abi-
tanti sopportava un debito che ammontava a ca. cinque fiorini e mezzo a
testa e a ca. 4 soldi di interessi pro capite.
Esaminate attraverso il secolo successivo, queste divergenze si appiatti-
scono considerevolmente. Anche se le cifre che si riferiscono ai valori tota-
li del debito pubblico sono soggette ad interpretazioni diverse, la tendenza
secolare, come frequentemente notato dalla storiografia, è univoca, e punta
su un aumento quasi continuo e spesso drammatico. L'aumento più evi-
dente si realizzò a Venezia, dove, nell’arco di poco più di mezzo secolo, il
debito crebbe di quasi tredici volte, da ca. 420.000 a ca. 5.400.000 ducati.
A questa cifra si aggiunse un’altro milione di ducati nel corso della prima
metà del quindicesimo secolo. Una tendenza identica, anche se meno ecla-
tante, si verificò nei casi di Firenze e di Genova. In quest’ultima, nonostan-
te vari tentativi di estinguere una parte del debito, nei primissimi anni del
quindicesimo secolo l'indebitamento del governo era salito a più di 3 milio-
ni di lire, cifra alla quale, a causa di consolidamenti successivi, sembra che
si aggiunsero quasi 5 milioni ulteriori, al punto che verso la metà del Quat-
trocento, il debito consolidato genovese sfiorava gli 8 milioni di lire.!? A
Firenze, il mezzo milione di fiorini della metà del Trecento salì a più di 3
milioni all’inizio del Quattrocento, e a questa cifra si aggiunsero altri tre o
quattro milioni nel corso dei cinque-sei decenni successivi."
Prima di ritornare al nostro argomento, cioè al peso relativo di questi
debiti rispetto alla popolazione delle tre città, è necessario fare una preci-
sazione sul significato di queste cifre. Il valore totale di un debito pubblico
può riferirsi a tre possibili valori: a quello nominale, sul quale il governo
versava interessi; ad un valore reale, 0, se vogliamo, di mercato, anche se è
questo un dato che, date le fluttuazioni del mercato, non è sempre facile
determinare con precisione; infine, al valore fiscale del debito, cioè il valo-
re assegnato dal governo ai crediti del debito pubblico nel considerarli base
imponibile al momento dell'imposizione di una tassa o di un prestito for-
zoso. Di questi tre valori, quello di mercato interessava più immediatamen-
te i privati cittadini, almeno quelli che si valevano di questi crediti per ope-
razioni economiche; quello nominale, anche se non irrilevante per i privati
(nel senso che l'ammontare di tasse e prestiti forzosi era largamente influen-
zato dalla grandezza di questa cifra) aveva un significato maggiore per l’am-
5 Sieveking (1905), n. 95.

4 Vedi infra, cap. 6.
ministrazione stessa del debito, perché forniva generalmente la base per il

calcolo degli interessi dovuti dal governo ai creditori; per ragioni ovvie, il
valore fiscale era di interesse immediato sia per i privati cittadini che per il
pubblico erario, perché, da un lato, i coefficienti sulla base dei quali veni-
vano ripartiti i prestiti forzosi erano determinati anche dal valore fiscale dei
crediti, e dall’altro, da quel valore fiscale dipendeva una parte degli introiti
che il governo contava di incassare.
Ma il problema di assegnare un valore preciso ad un debito pubblico
viene ulteriormente complicato dalla presenza di fondi speciali creati per
contribuire all’ammortamento di una porzione del debito (sinkirg funds).
Esempi di questi fondi erano numerosi a Genova, dove le cosiddette code
(caudes) servivano esattamente a questo scopo, e venivano create anche da
cittadini privati. Così una coda fu aperta nel 1371 da Francesco Vivaldi, il
quale destinò 90 dei suoi «loca» della compera pacts all’estinzione della
compera stessa, scopo raggiunto 83 anni dopo, nel 1454.” A Firenze il
Monte delle doti, specialmentte dopo il 1441, quando fu obbligatorio effet-
tuare depositi per le doti con crediti del Monte comune, servì a uno scopo
simile alle code genovesi, nel senso che quantità enormi di crediti del debi-
to pubblico venivano sistematicamente raccolte dal mercato ed accantona-
te nel Monte delle doti. Il Mons primus puellarum fondato nel 1441 aveva
già raggiunto una somma di quasi 340.000 fiorini di crediti un anno dopo;
dieci anni più tardi ammontava a poco meno di 3 milioni di crediti.!° Ci si
potrebbe domandare se, data la gestione separata e lo scopo specifico sia
delle code genovesi che del Monte delle doti fiorentino di contribuire alla
riduzione del debito statale, nel calcolare i totali dei debiti pubblici di que-
ste due città non si debbano aggiungere le somme di questi fondi speciali
alle somme del debito in circolazione perché in mani private. E una doman-
da sulla quale non mi sembra necessario soffermarci, anche se la nostra
valutazione del peso esercitato da questi debiti sulle economie private e
pubbliche dipende in un certo senso dalla risposta a questa domanda.
Comunque, il punto al quale vorrei ritornare è un altro, cioè l'aumento
continuo dei debiti pubblici, ininterrotto se esaminato dalla prospettiva del
lungo secolo (dalla metà del Trecento alla fine del Quattrocento) qui preso
in considerazione. In tutte e tre le città esaminate, conseguenza ovvia del-
l’aumento fu il bisogno di incrementare le entrate dei governi per fronteg-
giare le uscite rappresentate dagli interessi dovuti ai creditori dello stato. Se
visto da questa prospettiva, uno dei fenomeni di non secondaria importan-
za nella storia (non solo fiscale) delle tre città fu l’incapacità di queste entra-
5 Sieveking (1905), I, 196-199.

16 PR 143, cc. 1r-3r, 21 marzo 1451/2; Balie 29, cc. 45r-47v, 21 settembre 1458.
te di tenere il passo con l’aumento dei debiti pubblici. Ognuno dei tre
governi cercò una vasta gamma di rimedi per scoprire nuovi cespiti di
entrata: nonostante il malumore generale, specie quello dei ceti popolari e
del ceto medio, il peso delle gabelle fu considerevolmente inasprito, con
l'aumento delle loro tariffe, l'imposizione di nuove gabelle, e la non infre-
quente manipolazione della moneta con la quale si effettuava il loro paga-
mento. In più, si constata un inasprimento del peso della tassazione sop-
portata da comunità e da territori soggetti, e accanto a questo il tentativo di
colpire la ricchezza ecclesiastica, di limitare gli effetti della manomorta, e di
aumentare le tasse imposte sugli Ebrei.'’ In occasioni diverse e sotto circo-
stanze politiche particolari, i tre governi imposero penalità severe per
costringere i contribuenti morosi a pagare le loro tasse. Tutte queste inizia-
tive puntavano sull’aumento delle entrate. Ma oltre a questo, si constata
uno sforzo parallelo di diminuire le uscite, rendere più efficiente l’ammini-
strazione di certe magistrature, ed in particolare ridurre le spese del debito
pubblico. Così in tutt'e tre le città si diminuiscono i tassi di interesse paga-
ti ai creditori, si differisce il pagamento degli interessi annui, si converte una
parte degli interessi dovuti in crediti del debito stesso (con un effetto con-
troproducente ovvio, perché mentre al momento della conversione c’era
una diminuzione immediata della quantità di liquido necessario per il paga-
mento di interessi, il debito stesso aumentava, come aumentavano le somme
che nel futuro sarebbero state necessarie per finanziarlo). In certi casi, come
abbiamo già ricordato, si trattiene una parte degli interessi percepiti dai cre-
ditori, imponendo di fatto su di essi una tassa diretta.'*
Nonostante questi pur non sistematici sforzi, quello che colpisce è il diva-
rio tra l'aumento del debito pubblico e la stabilità delle entrate ordinarie dei
tre governi. Sarebbe a questo punto importante cercare di capire i riflessi di
questi fenomeni sulle situazioni fiscali di tutte e tre le città e in particolare
valutare le conseguenze dell’incapacità dei governi di colmare il divario cre-
scente tra le voci delle entrate e quelle delle uscite. Date le mie competenze
proporrei di concentrare la mia analisi sul caso fiorentino, anche se, alla fine
della mia presentazione, tornerò brevemente a Genova e Venezia.
Come già visto, intorno al 1343, il debito consolidato di Firenze si avvi-
cinava ai 500.000 fiorini, ed era finanziato con una spesa annua di ca.
77 Su Venezia si vedano i ben noti lavori di Luzzatto (1963), e di Lane (1973) e Lane
(1973a); su Genova, Heers (1961) e Day (1963); su Firenze: Becker (1967), Conti (1984) e
Molho (1971).
5 Per una visione d’insieme di queste politiche fiscali, l’unica, anche se breve trattazio-
ne, rimane quella di Day (1983), particolarmente 353-357, il paragrafo intitolato «Il debito
pubblico».
25.000 fiorini. In quell’epoca, la gabella delle porte produceva una cifra che
si aggirava sui 90.000 fiorini ogni anno, la gabella dei contratti ca. 20.000
fiorini, e quella del sale ca. 15.000, per un totale di ca. 135.000 fiorini, per
cui la spesa del finanziamento del debito si aggirava su ca. il 18,5 per cento
di quello che il governo ricavava da queste gabelle.!? Nei primi anni del
secolo successivo, la situazione era mutata notevolmente. Nel primo decen-
nio del Quattrocento, sul quale sono disponibili dati per sette anni, la
media annua necessaria per finanziare il debito era di ca. 236.026 fiorini, e
questa media aumentò ulteriormente a 254.209 fiorini nel decennio succes-
sivo. In quegli stessi anni, la media annua delle gabelle oscillò intorno a
200.000 fiorini, poco più nel primo decennio, poco meno nel secondo.”
Settant’anni dopo l’inizio del secolo, in coincidenza con l’inizio dell’età lau-
renziana, il finanziamento del debito richiedeva circa 148.000 fiorini dovu-
ti ai creditori del Monte comune ed un’ulteriore cifra di 198.000 fiorini
necessari per pagare gli obblighi del Monte delle doti, per un totale di
346.000 fiorini (quattordici ‘volte — 1400 percento — superiore alla cifra
corrispondente della metà del secolo precedente). I proventi delle gabelle
erano a loro volta saliti da ca. 135.000 a ca. 194.000 fiorini, appena il 143
percento del loro livello di oltre un secolo prima.?! Anche se è vero che, gra-
zie alla creazione di uno stato territoriale ben più vasto di quanto non lo era
stato verso la metà del Trecento, il governo fiorentino poté aumentare le
entrate provenienti da tasse percepite dal territorio, colpisce il divario tra
l'ammontare complessivo del debito e le risorse a disposizione del governo
per il pagamento degli interessi.
La situazione appena descritta è pienamente riconoscibile a chi sia anche
superficialmente familiare con la recente letteratura sulle finanze delle
repubbliche italiane. Quasi tutti questi studi si sono soffermati sulla neces-
sità avvertita dai governi contemporanei di fare affidamento sullo strumen-
to dei prestiti, data quella che, per motivi sia culturali che politici, si rivelò
come una rigidità, ovvero un limite quasi invalicabile, nella gestione fiscale
dell’epoca. L'atteggiamento più diffuso fra gli studiosi è quello di conside-
rare questo limite la causa primaria di una serie di altri fenomeni, il princi-
pale dei quali fu la creazione del debito pubblico, al quale non pochi stori-
ci, da Sieveking, Luzzatto e Becker, a Lane, Luzzati, Day ed altri ancora,
hanno attribuito un ruolo di primissimo ordine non solo economico, ma
anche politico. Se è certamente vero che questa tendenza interpretativa ci
1? Becker (1967), II, 152-155.

20 Molho (1971), 54, 61.
2! Per l’anno 1479, le entrate si possono calcolare dai dati in Monte comune 2470, cc.
545r-643r, mentre le uscite in Monte comune 1528, cc. 742v-967r.
offre una visione sufficientemente chiara della situazione qui presa in

esame, mi sembrerebbe tuttavia utile modificarne la prospettiva almeno in
parte. Entro la fine del Trecento, a Firenze come nelle altre due città, il
debito pubblico aveva già assunto una fisionomia ben chiara ed un peso dif-
ficilmente trascurabile. Cominciamo, allora, a chiederci quali furono gli
effetti, non solo economici, di questo debito pubblico ingombrante, alla
luce della cronica carenza di fondi per il suo finanziamento. Con l’eccezio-
ne dei nullatenenti (zzserabiles), tutti i cittadini erano costantemente incal-
zati dalle autorità pubbliche a pagare le loro prestanze. Ma gli amministra-
tori del Monte, oltre ad abbandonare anche la finzione di rimborsare ai cre-
ditori i loro capitali e data la insufficienza cronica delle entrate del governo,
furono ripetutamente costretti a ritardare il pagamento degli interessi ai
creditori, a diminuire il tasso d’interesse promesso loro, addirittura a tassa-
re questi proventi. In altre parole, il governo si dimostrò incapace di gesti-
re il debito pubblico tutelando gli interessi dei suoi creditori; e non è casua-
le che questa incapacità fosse legata all’inelasticità delle entrate ordinarie
del governo. Data questa congiuntura, è del tutto comprensibile la frustra-
zione dei creditori per la gestione dei loro investimenti (largamente forzo-
si) nel debito pubblico.
Anche se l’illustrazione di questa affermazione sarà presentata in un’al-
tra occasione, mi premerebbe ricordare che, accanto ad una serie di espres-
sioni, altamente retoriche, di intellettuali e funzionari del comune sull’im-
portanza del Monte (il Monte come cuore della città, il Monte come stru-
mento per difendere la libertà della patria ma anche per produrre ricchez-
za), si constata un comportamento civico che sembra smentire clamorosa-
mente questa linea ufficiale. E vero che nei primi decenni dopo il consoli-
damento del Monte il governo prometteva lauti guadagni a chi investisse
nel debito pubblico, e, sono le parole di Matteo Villani, «sopravenendo
molte gravi fortune e smisurati bisogni, mai questa fede [il Comune] non
maculò, onde avvenne che sempre ai suoi bisogni per la fede servata trova-
va prestanza da’ suoi cittadini senza alcuno rammaricamento» (id, 106). Il
cronista Marchionne di Coppo Stefani commentava con fierezza che in
quegli anni «la quantità degli uomini e donne» che si erano valsi della pos-
sibilità di prestare volontariamente i loro capitali al governo «era grande»,
e che «molti avieno venduti i loro poderi e le case, e chi disfatto bottega per
lo interesso di 15 o di 10 per 100, e chi gli aveva comperati [cioè, i crediti]
dalli pagatori, e pagato per loro...».?? Ma ci vollero pochi anni perché que-
sto atteggiamento cambiasse radicalmente. Già nel 1380, con la decisione di
* Sull’uso di queste espressioni, Marks (1960), e infra, cap. 6.

© Stefani, rub. 883. Per il giro di affari scatenato in quelli anni, Barducci (1979), 177-220.
ridurre il tasso d’interesse ad un massimo del 5 per cento, lo Stefani si

lamentava che «non credo, che già 100 anni, niuna così gran cosa si facesse
colle fave, come questa». Tredici anni dopo, quando il tasso d’interesse fu
ulteriormente diminuito, il cronista comunemente noto come lo pseudo-
Minerbetti, si rammaricava che «furono queste cose fatte contro alla fede
data per lo Comune a coloro che doveano avere; e molti cittadini ne rice-
vettero grandi danni; ma il Comune per la grande nicistà il fece, avegna che
fosse contro alla promessa fatta a loro». Ripetutamente, nei decenni suc-
cessivi, con il governo sempre alle prese con il problema del Monte, i pri-
vati dovettero rassegnarsi al fatto che il governo avrebbe agito «contro alla
fede» e «contro alle promesse» verso i suoi creditori.
Dalla fine del Trecento, fu proprio la «fede» che il comune aveva dato
che venne a mancare. Nessuno poteva più immaginare che i cittadini si
sarebbero disfatti delle loro fortune per prestare denaro al governo. Le pre-
stanze si pagavano mal volentieri, e solo perché costretti. Negli anni 50 del
Trecento quando furono creati i Monti «d’un due» e «d’un tre», Matteo
Villani aveva lamentato aspramente il fatto che il governo si fosse procura-
to del denaro «non per carità o affezione ch’ avessono i cittadini alla sua
repubblica, ma per la cupidigia del largo profitto; il quale fuori del buono
e antico costume de’ nostri maggiori molti n’ha tirati dalla mercatanzia in
su l’usura, e si ha ingrossato le coscienze, che le vedovelle poco si curano
dell'anime, pur che il monte risponda bene loro».*° Lasciando da parte il
tono moralistico del cronista e guardando alla situazione creatasi nel tardo
14° e nella prima metà del 15° secolo, non si può che concludere che l’ele-
mento che venne a mancare a Firenze fu la capacità del governo di soddi-
sfare quella «cupidigia del largo profitto», presente certamente in un gran
numero di persone. Da una parte, il governo che dominò gli affari pubbli-
ci dal 1382 fino al 1494, insisteva nell’affermare che avrebbe risposto alle
esigenze finanziarie attraverso prestiti provenienti dai propri cittadini. Ma
dall’altra, non offriva ai suoi potenziali creditori condizioni sufficientemen-
te favorevoli per indurli a fare quello che addirittura le «vedovelle» aveva-
no fatto ben volentieri qualche generazione prima.
Così si constatò nei confronti dei titoli del debito pubblico una diffusa
disaffezione tra larghi strati della popolazione, una buona parte della quale
cercava a tutti i costi di sottrarsi all'obbligo di pagare le prestanze. Il nume-
ro di quelli che continuavano a pagare il loro coefficiente ad rehabendum
diventando così creditori dello stato precipitò, e solo una parte dei «pre-
24 Barducci (1979).
3 Cronaca volgare (1915), XXVII, parte 2a, 161.
26 Villani, Cronica, VIII, 71.
stanziati» continuavano a diventare creditori del Monte. Nei decenni cen-

trali del Trecento questa frazione si aggirava intorno alla metà dei cittadini
iscritti nei ruoli fiscali; verso la fine del secolo e per tutto il periodo qui
preso in considerazione raramente eccedette il 20 per cento. La grande mag-
gioranza dei «prestanziati» preferiva pagare una porzione della propria
imposta a fondo perduto (ad perdendum), oppure vendere i propri coeffi-
cienti fiscali, cedendo a terzi (generalmente speculatori, oppure patrons che
pagavano per conto dei loro seguaci) i diritti su questi pagamenti.” Ma
anche quelli che pagavano regolarmente cercavano a tutti i costi di evadere
il fisco. Se già nelle dichiarazioni catastali del 1427 si constata una tendenza
a non dichiarare gli investimenti liquidi fatti all’estero, trent'anni più tardi
l'ammontare dichiarato nel catasto di questi investimenti ammontava solo
ad un decimo delle cifre globali del ’27.?8 Addirittura Cosimo de’ Medici,
boss indiscusso della città, padre della patria, e raffinato mecenate, falsificò
i propri libri contabili prima di farli esaminare dalle autorità del catasto.?°
Più grandi erano le esigenze finanziarie del governo, più costose e pro-
lungate le guerre dei fiorentini, e più grave diventava il problema sia dei pri-
vati che delle autorità. Ai primi veniva a mancare anche l’ultimo incentivo
a pagare le loro quote, perché sapevano che molto difficilmente il governo
avrebbe pagato gli interessi loro promessi. Da parte sua il governo, data la
modestia delle entrate ordinarie, era costretto ad attuare una politica puni-
tiva al posto della politica fiscale ufficiale, basata sull’attirare volontaria-
mente le risorse dei suoi cittadini. La disaffezione dei cittadini verso i titoli
del debito pubblico perdurò per tutta la prima metà del 15° secolo, e ben
oltre. Così si spiega un curioso fenomeno che si constata nelle portate al
catasto del 1457/58, dove un numero sorprendentemente alto di cittadini,
anche di persone appartenenti a famiglie di lunga tradizione politica, affer-
mano di non conoscere l’entità dei loro crediti nel Monte. Lorenzo di Tom-
maso Soderini semplicemente affermò di non sapere quanto egli aveva nel
Monte, nemmeno quale fosse il valore dei suoi crediti, mentre Daniello di
Luigi Canigiani asserì che non aveva mai tenuto conto dei suoi crediti del
Monte.” Non erano, questi, atteggiamenti di persone per le quali il Monte
rappresentava il cuore della città, e dal quale essi si aspettavano cospicui
profitti.
A rischio di essere ripetitivo, direi che a monte di questo atteggiamento
non solo ostile ma addirittura indifferente verso le autorità fiscali stavano
27 Molho (1971), 68-69.

2 Conti (1984), 149, 156, 322.
2 De Roover (1963), 107.
50 Catasto 795, c. 163v; 785, c. 109r.
due cause: il punto di vista, tradotto poi in una ben definita politica, secon-
do il quale i cives in contrasto ai sudditi non dovevano pagare imposte diret-
te se non in momenti del tutto eccezionali; e la cronica e strutturale inela-
sticità delle entrate ordinarie del governo. Il sistema fiscale avrebbe potuto
funzionare se almeno una delle due situazioni fosse cambiata, o facendo
ricorso alla tassazione diretta, o allargando le fonti delle entrate. Dal punto
di vista politico, era irrealistico pensare che la prima condizione potesse
mutare per iniziativa della classe dirigente. Sarebbe stato altrettanto irreali-
stico pensare che le strutture stesse dello stato fiorentino tardomedievale, e
cioè la loro capacità, anche soltanto teorica, di allargare le risorse finanzia-
rie disponibili al governo, potessero essere cambiate in un modo che gio-
vasse alla fiscalità pubblica.
Nella storia della fiscalità fiorentina si constata la stessa legge dell’oli-
garchia che, secondo Pareto, è evidente nella condotta delle vicende politi-
che. Nel suo articolo di quasi trent'anni fa, lo storico inglese Louis Marks
coniò l’espressione «oligarchia finanziaria» per riferirsi alla situazione poli-
tico-fiscale che si verificò a Firenze nei tempi di Lorenzo de’ Medici.*! Li-
dea di Marks ha avuto, giustamente, una notevole influenza sulle discussio-
ni recenti sul secondo Quattrocento fiorentino. Lesistenza di una finanza
pubblica parallela, imperniata sulla gestione del debito pubblico fluttuante
(da non confondere con il debito pubblico consolidato) aiuta molto a capi-
re certi sviluppi degli anni ’80 e ’90 del 15° secolo. L'unico neo della tesi di
Marks è che il fenomeno da lui studiato è molto più vecchio di quanto egli
non sospettasse. Debiti fluttuanti, cioè a breve e anche brevissima scaden-
za, si constatano in molte città tardomedievali, italiane e non. A Firenze
sono presenti riferimenti a questa pratica sin dai primi del 14° secolo, anche
se quasi certamente era conosciuta anche in precedenza. Dai primi del
Quattrocento il ricorso al debito fluttuante fu continuo e massiccio. A un
gruppo ristretto di banchieri veniva affidato il compito di fornire al gover-
no quantità considerevoli di denaro liquido, in cambio di una restituzione
rapida del capitale e del pagamento di tassi d’interesse che eccedevano, a
volte anche di 4-5 volte, quelli offerti ai creditori del Monte comune. Nel
corso del 15° secolo si stabilì l'usanza che gli ufficiali del Monte, cioè i
magistrati incaricati di amministrare il debito consolidato, dovessero, come
condizione per assumere il loro incarico, avanzare prestiti a breve termine
al governo. È ovvio, come ha commentato Marks per la fine del Quattro-
cento (ma l’osservazione vale per tutto l’arco del secolo) che nell’assegna-
zione delle entrate dello stato gli interessi dei creditori del debito fluttuan-
3! Marks (1960).
32 Marks (1960) e anche Conti (1984), 71,78.
te avrebbero finito per precedere quelli dei creditori del debito a più lungo
termine. Dalla fine del Trecento fino al crollo della repubblica nel 1531, il
debito fluttuante diventò la linfa vitale della repubblica fiorentina: non solo
le guerre, ma le missioni diplomatiche, l'acquisto di grano, il finanziamen-
to di condottieri e molte altre spese emergenti venivano pagate con il dena-
ro proveniente da questi prestiti a breve termine. Tanto per fare un esem-
pio, nell’arco di una ventina di mesi, dalla fine del 1430 a tutto agosto 1432,
il governo dovette farsi prestare da un gruppo abbastanza ristretto di ban-
chieri una media di 16.500 fiorini al mese, per un totale di oltre 560.000 fio-
rini. Chi erogava questi prestiti, per dirla con Matteo Villani, lo faceva
«non per carità o affezione... alla sua repubblica», ma piuttosto «per la
cupidigia dell’alto profitto».
La storia della gestione del fisco fiorentino dopo la fine del Trecento col-
pisce l’attenzione di un osservatore moderno non tanto per l’uso che si fece
del debito pubblico (sia di quello consolidato che di quello fluttuante), per-
ché come già visto queste pratiche erano abbastanza diffuse nell’epoca pre-
moderna. La caratteristica che sembra definire la politica fiscale fiorentina
è quella che possiamo chiamare la debolezza dello stato, la sua incapacità di
applicare una politica che ponesse gli interessi della comunità, o se voglia-
mo, gli interessi dello stato stesso, al di sopra degli interessi dei gruppi
direttamente responsabili del suo finanziamento. Sulla linea di un confron-
to che rischia di sconfinare nell’anacronistico, noterei che in altri momenti
nella storia moderna dell'Europa soluzioni diverse furono adottate per
risolvere problemi che sembrano molto simili a quelli affrontati a Firenze
nel Quattrocento. L'esempio diametralmente opposto a quello fiorentino
tardomedievale mi sembra sia quello inglese, in piena età moderna.* Verso
la fine del Seicento e i primi del Settecento il regno d'Inghilterra dovette far
ricorso a un uso massiccio dell’indebitamento, sia a lungo che a breve ter-
mine. Ma, in contrasto con il caso fiorentino, questo sviluppo coincise con
una politica aggressiva volta ad allargare le entrate del regno, meta rag-
giunta felicemente sia con l’applicazione di una politica fiscale più severa
nell’esazione dei dazi, sia con il moltiplicarsi dei prodotti e delle attività
economiche sottoposte alla tassazione. L'aumento delle entrate ordinarie, il
cui incameramento veniva garantito da una politica severa e costante, per-
mise al governo inglese di intraprendere una serie di ristrutturazioni del
debito pubblico, facendo affluire il debito fluttuante nel debito consolida-
to. Obbligazioni a breve termine venivano così trasformate in obbligazioni
a lungo termine, con il risultato di garantire al governo una molto maggio-
> Molho (1971), 180-181.

4 Seguo l’analisi di Brewer (1990).
re elasticità finanziaria. Queste ristrutturazioni poterono essere eseguite

solo perché i creditori dello stato — quelli cioè che potevano sborsare,
anche a breve scadenza, grandi somme di denaro liquido — avevano piena
fiducia nella capacità del governo di pagare loro gli interessi dovuti. E que-
sta fiducia nasceva dalla consapevolezza che i proventi dello stato erano suf-
ficientemente alti per far fronte alle aspettative dei suoi creditori. In un
certo senso, il rigore dell’amministrazione fiscale permetteva allo stato di
realizzare un duplice obiettivo: finanziare attraverso un uso massiccio del-
l'indebitamento le grandi guerre che dai primi del Settecento contribuiro-
no a fare dell’Inghilterra la massima potenza mondiale del suo tempo, senza
però diventare l’ostaggio degli interessi di una ristretta oligarchia finanzia-
ria. Investire nel governo era diventata un’operazione redditizia, e larghi
strati della società inglese, /ords di campagna, imprenditori urbani, appar-
tenenti ai ceti medi si valsero della possibilità di diventare creditori dello
stato. Da parte sua lo stato, cioè l’amministrazione fiscale del regno, basan-
dosi su questa nuova capacftà di procurarsi un flusso costante di entrate
ordinarie, poté soddisfare le esigenze economiche di una buona parte dei
suoi cittadini. Nel caso dell’Inghilterra, l’uso spregiudicato del debito pub-
blico permise allo stato di modernizzarsi, perché l’amministrazione del
debito richiese lo sviluppo di infrastrutture amministrative più efficienti e
di un disciplinamento fiscale molto maggiore che in precedenza, e contri-
buì ad una gestione della fiscalità basata su rapporti più impersonali tra
l’amministrazione statale e i cittadini.
Mi sembra di aver indugiato anche troppo a lungo su questo implicito
confronto tra Firenze e il regno d'Inghilterra, e non vorrei soffermarmici
ulteriormente, anche se, data l’abitudine di non pochi studiosi di riferirsi
alla mera presenza del debito pubblico come fattore essenziale di una certa
modernizzazione dello stato fiorentino, il contrasto con la situazione ingle-
se non può che colpirci. Nella Firenze tardo medievale, le entrate ordinarie
erano rimaste più o meno stabili attraverso la seconda metà del Trecento e
di tutto il Quattrocento, la loro raccolta difficile, il loro ammontare appena
sufficiente a coprire una frazione delle spese necessarie per finanziare il
Monte. I creditori del governo, consapevoli di questa debolezza delle finan-
ze pubbliche, non si mostrarono disposti a fare quello che i loro antenati
della metà del Trecento erano pronti a fare volentieri: prestare i loro capi-
tali al Comune. Chi pagava le prestanze si sentiva costretto a pagare in virtù
della capacità punitiva del Comune. Chi, d’altra parte, possedeva capitali
che potevano servire al governo per affrontare bisogni immediati, non pote-
va che esigere un rimborso rapido, a tassi d’interesse alti, perché era consa-
pevole che esponeva il proprio denaro ad un rischio alto. Il governo non
ispirava fiducia, avendo ‘ripetutamente violato la fiducia accordatagli dai
suoi creditori.
Da queste osservazioni sembra di poter trarre la conclusione che la fun-

zione politica del Monte — il suo contributo a quel processo di statalizza-
zione spesso discusso da molti storici — fu assai limitata. A Firenze il
Monte, a causa delle modeste risorse disponibili allo stato, almeno in con-
fronto alle sue esigenze, servi, sì, come veicolo per l’affermazione e il con-
solidamento di una classe dirigente, ma non poté contribuire alla creazione
di un tipo di stato che, parafrasando Machiavelli in un passo che esamine-
remo più avanti, fu «parte bene e ugualmente amministrata». Mi sembra
che la responsabilità di questo fallimento vada ricercata non solo negli
atteggiamenti politici della classe dominante fiorentina, ma anche nella
mancanza di un equilibrio tra le ambizioni di quella classe e le risorse a dis-
posizione del governo. Lo studio delle vicende fiorentine nell’arco di tempo
qui preso in considerazione ci induce a ritornare alla riflessione di Federi-
co Chabod su Milano nei primi decenni del 16° secolo. Gli stati dell’antico
regime, scrisse Chabod, erano «travagliati dalla continua insufficienza di
redditi e da un assetto tributario non proporzionato alla politica di poten-
za costantemente perseguita». Insomma, gli stati italiani, tra i quali spicca
il caso di Firenze, fallirono nel loro tentativo di creare strutture capaci di
affrontare i loro problemi, tra i quali uno dei principali era il finanziamen-
to del debito pubblico, proprio perché vennero loro a mancare le entrate
ordinarie, entrate che avrebbero loro consentito di diventare qualcosa di
più di quello che furono: strumenti per la realizzazione degli interessi di
classi dominanti assai ristrette, formate da cittadini capaci, se appropriata-
mente retribuiti sia economicamente che politicamente, di finanziare i biso-
gni del governo.
Non vorrei che, a causa dell’impostazione delle mie osservazioni prece-
denti, si perdesse di vista l’importanza di due fenomeni di carattere squisi-
tamente economico, strettamente collegati al debito pubblico: il Monte
delle doti e il mercato dei crediti del Monte. Mi pare importante sottoli-
neare che, almeno nei primi anni dopo la sua creazione, l’esistenza stessa
del Monte delle doti contribuì a restaurare una certa fiducia da parte di
ampi strati della popolazione nella gestione fiscale del governo. Chi si tro-
vava in possesso di crediti del Monte aveva ora una possibilità di investirli
proficuamente convertendoli in depositi dotali. Il dirottamento di un
numero cospicuo di crediti del Monte verso il Monte delle doti servì anche
a stabilire i prezzi dei crediti del Monte. Ma, ben presto, la capacità del
governo di tutelare i depositi dotali, e di salvaguardare da una loro conti-
nua erosione i prezzi dei crediti del Monte si rivelò assai fragile. Come nota-
# Chabod (1961), 349.

36 Kirshner and Molho (1978).
va Marks, il Monte delle doti subì una serie di ristrutturazioni che si tra-
dussero in una diminuzione notevole della sua importanza per le strategie
matrimoniali dei cittadini. E i prezzi dei crediti del Monte si assestarono su
livelli bassi per tutto il resto del 15° secolo.?”
Inoltre, i crediti del Monte ebbero un'importanza economica difficil-
mente trascurabile per chi analizzi le vicende economiche di Firenze nel
Quattrocento. Una serie di sondaggi intrapresi finora suggeriscono che,
anche se il numero di «poste» accatastate che vantavano crediti del Monte
diminuì di ca. il 10-15 per cento dal 1427 al 1458 (da ca. 2200 a ca. 1950
poste), il Monte offrì uno sbocco di investimento a gruppi diversificati di
persone.’ I crediti di Monte servivano non tanto per effettuare pagamenti
tra privati, anche se non mancano riferimenti a questo loro uso; piuttosto, i
privati si valevano dei crediti per pagare «prestanze» e multe comminate
dagli uffici fiscali, per fornire garanzie (sodamenti) al momento dell’acqui-
sto di immobili, e per il pagamento di doti. La richiesta di questi crediti,
anche se non enorme, era costante. Un altro sondaggio suggerisce che nel-
Parco di un anno (1458, scelto come campione per questa analisi) ca.
1.089.000 fiorini di crediti (ca. il 13.6 per cento del valore nominale del
debito pubblico) furono contrattati nel mercato; i due terzi di questa cifra,
700.812 fiorini (8.8 per cento del valore nominale del debito) furono utiliz-
zati dal governo per gestire il conto del Monte delle doti. Il resto, 388.188
fiorini (4.9 per cento del debito) fu usato da privati. Ma ben più della metà
di questa cifra, ca. 215.676 fiorini, furono destinati al sodamento di beni
immobili e dotali, e al trasferimento temporaneo dell’uso ma non della pro-
prietà (nel linguaggio corrente: «porre una condizione») di un certo nume-
ro di crediti. Solo 172.512 fiorini (ca. il 2.2 per cento del valore nominale
del debito pubblico) fu destinato a transazioni private, e in questa cifra
sono compresi tutti i trasferimenti di proprietà a causa di disposizioni testa-
mentarie.?? Tutto ciò suggerisce che il Monte offriva degli spazi per attività
economiche, di cui d'altronde è facile rischiare di esagerare l’importanza. In
fin dei conti, anche se le cifre sono di interpretazione molto difficile, sem-
bra di intravedere un netto calo nella percentuale dei crediti del Monte
nelle proprietà soggette al catasto: ca. il 25 per cento della ricchezza fioren-
tina nel 1427 era composta da crediti del Monte. Nel 1458, la percentuale
era scesa a ca. il 17 per cento.?°
}7 Si veda, in generale, Marks (1960) e Conti (1984), 33-35.

8 Herlihy et Klapisch (1978), 243, 251; i dati per l’anno 1458 provengono da uno spo-
glio da me intrapreso.
39 I dati provengono da Monte comune 3196. Le cifre sono stime basate su una scheda-
tura completa solo dei primi dieci giorni di ogni mese.
40 Si veda la nota 38.
A questo quadro si può aggiungere che a Firenze, come d’altronde a

Genova e forse anche a Venezia, si avverte la presenza di un numero di per-
sone di estrazione assai umile che non infrequentemente accedevano al
mercato secondario dei crediti del Monte. Bastava avere a disposizione
qualche fiorino di contanti per fare un piccolo investimento con il quale
aprire un conto dotale, oppure cercare di cogliere un piccolo profitto.*!
Teoricamente, il mercato rimaneva accessibile a tutti, anche ad artigiani,
come quel Marco di Zanobi «rimendatore», alle cui vicende Bruno Dini
recentemente ha dedicato un bel saggio. Molte cause finivano per limita-
re il numero delle persone coinvolte nella compravendita di crediti del
Monte: le fluttuazioni del mercato, il rischio al quale il capitale investito era
esposto, il fatto che la possibilità di sfruttare fino in fondo le occasioni
offerte da quel mercato erano accessibili solo a chi non solo possedeva un
surplus di capitale non modesto, ma anche ne capiva bene il funzionamen-
to. In conclusione, il Monte esercitò una precisa funzione economica, la
cui importanza non va persa di vista, ma nemmeno confusa con il suo ruolo
sociale e politico.
Questa ricostruzione, anche se eccessivamente schematica, può offrire
una prospettiva dalla quale esaminare le storie fiscali di Genova e Venezia.
Fino a che punto, ci si può domandare, tendenze evidenti a Firenze si intra-
vedono anche nelle altre due città? Anche qui, una risposta adeguata richie-
derebbe una conoscenza di prima mano delle loro fonti fiscali e politiche
che sfortunatamente mi manca. L'uso degli studi esistenti mi ha permesso
di arrivare, più che ad una serie di conclusioni, al sottotitolo di questa rela-
zione: «quesiti», o, se vogliamo, una serie di punti sui quali desidererei
approfondire le mie conoscenze.
A prima vista, sembrerebbe che lo sviluppo delle situazioni di Genova e
Venezia differisca non poco da quello di Firenze. Numerosi storici hanno
osservato che a Venezia furono gli interessi dello stato a prevalere su quelli
degli investitori, mentre al contrario a Genova, con la creazione della Casa
di San Giorgio, i creditori dello stato si assicurarono garanzie e protezioni
del tutto mancanti sia ai veneziani che ai fiorentini. Riferendosi agli anni
1377-1381, momento tra i più critici di tutta la storia veneziana, Luzzatto
concludeva che «lo Stato usa ed abusa del suo diritto d’imperio di fronte ai
propri creditori, considerandoli per quello che effettivamente essi sono,
4! Per Genova: Gioffré (1982), 143, Tabelle 1 e 2.

Dini GOSO)s
176% di coloro che permutarono crediti del Monte nel 1458 aveva un cognome,
mentre per l’intera città nel 1427 il loro numero ammontò a 3.608 dei 9.821 capi famiglia
(37%) e nel 1480 a 4.063 dei 8.414 (48,3%) capi famiglia compresi nel catasto di quegli
anni.
come semplici contribuenti».44 Mentre a Genova, sempre secondo lo stori-

co veneziano, i prestiti erano imposti secondo limiti ben precisi (sia il loro
numero che l'ammontare di ognuno definiti in anticipo) a Venezia si impo-
neva una percentuale dell’estimo senza precisare l'ammontare che lo stato
cercava di procurarsi. A Venezia, riassumeva Luzzatto, la repubblica non
rinunziò mai alla piena sovranità finanziaria di fronte ai suoi creditori. A
Genova, la debolezza dello Stato aveva creato la situazione descritta in un
noto passo da Machiavelli nelle sue Istorie fiorentine: «quelli cittadini
hanno levato l’amore dal Comune, come cosa tiraneggiata, e postolo a San
Giorgio, come parte bene o ugualmente amministrata». Genova, insom-
ma, sarebbe l’esempio perfetto di uno stato che si arrese davanti ai suoi cre-
ditori, creando esplicitamente quei rapporti di forza, che a Firenze si sareb-
bero sviluppati in modo più velato e meno esplicito.
Mi domando se, anche all’interno di un quadro che accentua le diffe-
renze tra queste tre città, non esista lo spazio per sollevare qualche dubbio
su queste caratterizzazioni e smussare i contrasti nel rapporto tra politica e
gestione fiscale finora delineato nelle loro storie. Il problema delle entrate
ordinarie rappresenta il primo evidente punto che esse hanno in comune. E
chiaro che sin dalla fine del Trecento, a Genova e a Venezia si verificò quel-
lo stesso intreccio di circostanze che abbiamo incontrato nel caso fiorenti-
no: difficoltà nell’incassare gabelle e tasse ordinarie; la nascita simultanea di
una consapevolezza che la difesa del credito dello stato dipendeva dalla sua
capacità di raccogliere proventi di queste tasse, le cui rate venivano siste-
maticamente aumentate; il rendersi conto che era estremamente difficile
mantenere questi proventi ad un livello proporzionato all'aumento del
debito pubblico. In tutte e due le città sembra possibile intravedere la stes-
sa perdita di fiducia che abbiamo incontrato a Firenze.
A Genova, lo Stato perdette il credito di cui godeva presso i cittadini a
vantaggio di San Giorgio, avendo dovuto assegnare a questo organismo la
responsabilità ed il compito di incassare le gabelle e le tasse dirette impo-
ste alle comunità soggette. Ma questa situazione non mutò la natura del
problema principale. A Genova, come a Firenze l’esazione delle gabelle
avveniva con difficoltà, mentre il loro ammontare globale aumentava
molto più lentamente che non il debito pubblico. Una delibera del 1441
accennava al problema, che si era spesso verificato in passato: «Tutto lo
tempo passao lo officio molto più tosto ha pagao li proventi a li locatari
dagando la scripta in lo banco, che non ha ricevuo li pagamenti dagli cabe-
4 Luzzatto (1963), 135.

PNT 29,
46 Sieveking (1905), II, 22-23; Heers (1961), 97-98.
lotti; dalla qual cosa à seguio grandissimo interesse, perocché questa forma
ha producto grande scarsitate allo banco». Le conseguenze di questa
situazione non sono del tutto chiare. Mi si consenta perciò di fare una serie
di ipotesi basate su riferimenti sparsi in vari studi. Le crisi diplomatiche e
militari si susseguivano a Genova con frequenza non minore che in altre
città. Il governo doveva procurarsi fondi per affrontare queste crisi, ma
l’alternativa del credito di San Giorgio non offriva risultati rapidi, perché
probabilmente i banchieri ed altri imprenditori, consapevoli delle difficol-
tà incontrate dai Protettori di San Giorgio nel raccogliere le tasse loro asse-
gnate, si sarebbero comportati in modo analogo ai banchieri fiorentini, esi-
tando ad offrire i loro capitali allo Stato se non in condizioni a loro molto
favorevoli.
L'attuale storiografia su Genova non offre molti elementi con i quali
approfondire questo tema. Jacques Heers accenna brevemente al debito
fluttuante genovese, lasciando capire che durante la serie di lunghe crisi del
15° secolo il governo cercò di attirare i capitali dei grandi mercanti.** Inol-
tre, lo studio di Domenico Gioffré, secondo il quale la maggioranza dei cre-
ditori di una delle compere di San Giorgio non apparteneva alle classi
sociali più alte, suggerisce che nel tardo Trecento e nel Quattrocento, a
Genova come a Firenze, il debito consolidato non poteva servire gli inte-
ressi dei maggiori imprenditori della città. Anche se è chiaro che grandi
imprenditori come Giovanni Piccamiglio partecipavano al mercato secon-
dario dei prestiti acquistando dai loro concittadini meno abbienti crediti già
emessi da San Giorgio, l’esistenza di questo mercato non incentivava i cit-
tadini a contribuire con i loro capitali alle compere, ogni volta che il gover-
no si appellava a San Giorgio per un prestito; piuttosto, il mercato dei pre-
stiti offriva possibilità di guadagni a chi, appunto come Piccamiglio, posse-
deva le risorse per partecipare al mercato secondario.” Le operazioni di
questo mercato avevano solo una minima influenza sulle finanze dello
Stato.
A Venezia, come notava l'ambasciatore mantovano, i cittadini erano
abituati a «lucrari et non gravari».?! Questo atteggiamento non scoraggiò
il governo dal cercare, specie verso la fine del 14° secolo, di aumentare le
tariffe delle gabelle. Ma questi sforzi furono coronati da successo solo par-
7 Citato in Sieveking (1905), II, 88, n. 1.

Vales (EL), 15).
4 Gioffré (1982).
” Heers (1959), 33-4: «opération interessante...mais qui n’est pas à la portée de chacun.
Elle reste l'apanage des hommes d’affaires disposant de capitaux et d’une bonne organisa-
ton».
>! Citato in Luzzatto (1963), 168.
zialmente e con grande difficoltà, e la fluttuazione dei prezzi dei prestiti,

più particolarmente la tendenza ad un loro continuo abbassamento nella
prima metà del quindicesimo secolo, indica l’esistenza della stessa con-
giuntura già incontrata a Firenze: l’erosione della fiducia dei creditori
verso lo stato, l’indebolimento progressivo degli strati sociali che non pote-
vano attivamente intervenire nel mercato secondario in cui si negoziavano
i prestiti, e la conseguente perdita di quel nesso di fiducia tra contribuen-
ti e governo creatosi in un periodo precedente, dalla metà del 13° secolo
fino alla conclusione della guerra con Genova nel 1381. Esistono dati più
che abbondanti per comprovare queste affermazioni: il numero crescente
di veneziani che finirono per rimanere in arretrato con il pagamento del-
l’estimo, le misure punitive attuate dalla repubblica nei loro confronti, la
confisca e vendita all’asta di proprietà dei morosi, e l'emergere di una men-
talità tra i ceti benestanti di Venezia che giudicava con molto scetticismo la
possibilità di investire in prestiti, come dimostra, d’altronde, l’esperienza
di Andrea Barbarigo.” Insomma, a Venezia come a Firenze, a cominciare
dalla fine del Trecento e in coincidenza con l’espansione del raggio di atti-
vità del governo, specialmente nel campo della diplomazia e della guerra,
venne a mancare esattamente quella fiducia che nel passato aveva cemen-
tato i rapporti tra il governo ed un ampio strato di cittadini. L'attuale sto-
riografia, almeno quella a me nota, non offre molte indicazioni sulla storia
del debito fluttuante veneziano. Riferimenti a questa pratica, anche se non
numerosi, lasciano pensare che anche a Venezia l'emergere dello stato tar-
domedievale non fu accompagnato da una sua capacità di gestire la fisca-
lità pubblica in modo tale da separare gli interessi dello Stato da quelli dei
banchieri ed imprenditori più abbienti. A Venezia, come altrove, causa
principale di questa mancata trasformazione (per dirla con Machiavelli:
dal Comune come cosa tiraneggiata allo Stato come parte bene e ugual-
mente amministrata) sembra essere stata l’incapacità del governo di
aumentare le proprie entrate e di acquistare una base fiscale autonoma, o
almeno non del tutto dipendente dalle risorse finanziarie di un gruppo
ristretto di banchieri.
Concluderei con poche riflessioni. L'ipotesi principale che mi sembra
emerga da questa relazione è questa: lo sviluppo politico delle città stato ita-
liane nel tardo medioevo fu in un certo senso bloccato dalla incapacità di
allargare le loro basi fiscali. Mentre le loro ambizioni territoriali, militari,
diplomatiche, e in certi sensi economiche si allargavano notevolmente, e
con le ambizioni aumentavano proporzionalmente le voci di uscita dei loro
bilanci, le loro classi dirigenti si mostravano generalmente incapaci di per-
> Luzzatto (1963), cap. III.

cepire l’importanza di un cambiamento radicale dei metodi e delle strategie

impositive. Per supplire ai loro bisogni tutti questi stati scelsero lo stru-
mento dell’indebitamento, e tutti — non solo i tre ai quali ho rivolto la mia
attenzione in questa relazione, ma Lucca, Pisa, Siena e altri ancora —”
riuscirono a creare complicate strutture per gestire i monti dei debiti accu-
mulati dopo la metà del 14° secolo. Ma questi debiti, contrariamente a
quanto era asserito dalla pubblicistica dell’epoca e viene ripetuto da una
storiografia più recente, finivano per indebolire lo stato, anziché rafforzar-
lo. La mancanza di entrate ordinarie che potessero permettere alle autorità
politiche e fiscali di soddisfare le legittime domande dei loro creditori inde-
boliva lo stato davanti ai suoi principali finanziatori. Questa situazione è già
documentabile concretamente nel caso di Firenze. Sarebbe interessante
confermare o comunque verificare questa generalizzazione per Venezia e
Genova.
Una conferma fornirebbe la chiarificazione di un apparente paradosso
recentemente segnalato da uno storico delle finanze pubbliche genovesi,
che ha scritto: «Uno dei paradossi della storia del pensiero è che il Rinasci-
mento intellettuale, il cui supporto economico era fornito dai mercanti-ban-
chieri tardomedievali, non riuscì a produrre un Machiavelli dell'economia
politica, pronto ad “entrare per una via... non ancora da alcuno trita”, vale
a dire costruire una scienza economica autonoma». Se esaminato dalla
prospettiva proposta in questa relazione, mi sembra che il paradosso si dis-
solva assai rapidamente. Le finanze pubbliche delle città-stato italiane dopo
la metà del 14° secolo erano radicate in pratiche non molto nuove. Ma
anche se dal punto di vista tecnico e gestionale si constata l’adozione di
approcci genuinamente innovativi (si pensi al Monte delle doti; o alle cau-
des genovesi), il contesto politico e sociale che inquadrava queste innova-
zioni le trasformava in strumenti fortemente conservatori e ritardatari. Dal
punto di vista dei risultati politici, c'era poco di genuinamente nuovo nella
gestione del debito pubblico a Firenze.
E possibile che il giudizio espresso nei paragrafi precedenti contenga
un’ingiustizia nei confronti delle classi dirigenti delle città italiane. Indub-
biamente, la formulazione di una politica fiscale rientrava nell’ambito delle
loro responsabilità, e in questo senso il fallimento della politica fiscale va
ricondotto alle loro azioni (o inazioni). Ma anche nel caso che avessero
voluto cambiare direzione quali possibilità impositive erano loro offerte dai
loro piccoli stati? E difficile immaginare che nemmeno Venezia, probabil-
mente la più ricca delle città stato italiane, potesse cambiando drastica-
© Una breve ma eccellente sintesi si trova in Cammarosano (1988).

4 Day (1988), 22.
mente la sua politica fiscale raggiungere traguardi fiscali che i grandi stati
che si stavano formando in quell’epoca stavano raggiungendo soprattutto in
virtù dell’estensione del loro territorio e della grandezza delle loro popola-
zioni. In definitiva, furono forse gli stessi caratteri di questi stati a risultare
in una loro stagnazione (se non addirittura regressione) politica.
In conclusione, vorrei riproporre la domanda con la quale ho iniziato
questa relazione, domanda ispirata dalla citazione gladstoniana sugli effetti
della fiscalità sulla prosperità delle persone, sui rapporti tra le classi sociali,
e sulla potenza degli stati. La mia risposta dovrebbe essere già chiara da
quello che ho detto finora. Se è vero, come indubbiamente lo è, che i debi-
ti pubblici delle città-stato italiane finirono per arricchire una parte delle
loro popolazioni, quella parte, cioè, che già era economicamente più forte,
mi sembra altrettanto vero che questi debiti resero più difficili i rapporti tra
le classi sociali, e indebolirono la potenza di questi stati. Non mi sembra
esagerato attribuire il crollo del 1494, e le tensioni sociali e politiche che ne
seguirono, anche alla debolezza fiscale delle città-stato italiane, e agli atteg-
giamenti verso lo stato che derivavano da questa debolezza: una maggio-
ranza che guardava alla cosa pubblica con ostilità che spesso sconfinava nel-
l'indifferenza, una minoranza che nella stessa cosa pubblica vedeva un pos-
sesso privato, quasi una proprietà inalienabile.
7A
Di
CRÉDITEURS DE FLORENCE EN 1347.
UN APERCU STATISTIQUE DU QUARTIER
DE SANTO SPIRITO
Les historiens de Florence ont souvent commenté la création du Monte

Comune. Depuis les chroniqueurs de l’époque, tels que Giovanni et Matteo
Villani, et un peu plus tard Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, jusqu’aux histo-
riens des deux générations récentes, l’établissement de la dette publique a
été considéré l’un des tournants institutionnels de l’histoire médiévale de
Florence. Le Monte a fourni aux historiens de Florence un point de repère
pour observer la politique, l’économie, la société et même la culture de la
ville, surtout pendant approximativement la centaine d’années depuis la
moitié du quatorzième siècle jusqu’a la moitié du quinzième siècle. Récem-
ment nous avons beaucoup appris aussi sur l’histoire sociale de la dette
publique au quinzième siècle. Un examen attentif des tableaux (archives) du
fisc de la ville préparés après l’imposition du catasto en 1427 a révélé la
mince base sociale des créditeurs de la ville durant le quinzième siècle.
Jusqu'ici, nous avons eu peu d’évidence sur l’histoire sociale de la dette
publique au quatorzième siècle. Certainement, quelques-uns des chroni-
queurs importants de la ville, spécialement les frères Villani et Stefani, ont
mentionné ce qu'ils supposaient être une vaste base sociale des créanciers
du Monte.” Suivant ces témoins contemporains, on pouvait imaginer que la
limitation de la base sociale de la propriété du Monte au quinzième siècle
mentionnée par des historiens récents était le produit du processus d’aris-
tocratisation qui eut lieu après l’écrasement de la révolution des Ciompi en
1378 et l'établissement du régime des Albizzi en 1382.
Dans cet essai je voudrais présenter les résultats préliminaires de mes
recherches sur l’histoire de la dette publique de Florence vers la fin de l’ère
médiévale, Ce projet se trouve au stage tout à fait initial et sa réalisation
! Herlihy et Klapisch (1978), 251-256.

2 Un bref aperçu récent del’histoire de la dette publique se trouve ##fra, ch. 6; Barduc-
ci (1979) présente une étude qui fait autorité sur l’histoire antérieure du Monte.
nécessitera du temps. Mais ces premiers résultats qui visent a tracer un por-
trait collectif du groupe des Florentins qui investirent dans la dette publique
au moment méme de sa fondation, nous permettent de formuler une hypo-
thèse initiale sur l’histoire à long terme de la dette publique. Et cette hypo-
thèse confirme et à la fois modifie l’image de l’histoire-initiale de la dette
publique transmise par les chroniqueurs florentins du quatorzième siècle.
Il n’est pas nécessaire d’analyser ici les circonstances qui menèrent à la
création du Monte. Bernardino Barbadoro, Marvin Becker et Roberto Bar-
ducci l’ont déjà fait.) Le seul point préliminaire à examiner ici concerne les
minces bases empiriques sur lesquelles se basent les observations suivantes.
La législation initiale qui mena a la création du Monte fut promulguée en
1343. Mais la décision de créer une structure unifiée des actes de la Socié-
té pour enregistrer tous les créanciers de la ville, fut prise lentement, le long
d’un nombre d’années. Finalement, en juin 1347, l’Esecutore degli Ordina-
menti della Giustizia, Messer Landuccio ser Landi de Beccis de Eugubio,
autorisa la rédaction de registres, un pour chacun des quatre Quartiers de
la ville, dans lesquels on devait enregistrer les créanciers de la ville.* On pré-
para ainsi quatre registres, contenant chacun les noms de milliers et de mil-
liers d’individus qui, vers les années mi-1340, se trouvèrent inclus dans les
listes des créditeurs de leur gouvernement. Dans la présente étude je me
concentre sur l’un de ces quatre livres, celui qui se réfère au Quartier de
Santo Spirito et le seul que j'ai étudié systématiquement.’ C’est un immen-
se volume qui consiste de 1087 folios en parchemin. Il est écrit “per me
Dinum Attaviani de Castagnuolo, notario florentino,” avec l’aide d’un petit
groupe d’autres notaires. Le but de cette équipe de scribes était d’enregis-
trer “omnes et singulos homines et personas tam de civitate quam de comi-
tatu seu districtu Florentiae, quarterii Sancti Spiritus, ac etiam quam
homines et personas forenses qui... recipere debebant... a comuni Floren-
tiae” selon les actes d’un “registro... existente in Camera Actorum dicti
comunis.”° Les scribes enregistrèrent les créditeurs par ordre alphabétique
selon leur nom de baptéme, et ayant atteint le folio 1056, ils avaient rempli
un total de 130 livres plus petits (guaterni) auxquels ils ajoutèrent encore 20
folios (ff. 1058r-1087r) qui contenaient les additions et émendations, pour
la plupart concernant les aliénations ou acquisitions de crédits du Monte
par des créditeurs individuels. Chaque individu était enregistré sous son
nom complet (aussi dans le cas de 73 femmes sur les 3048 cas), la valeur du
? Barbadoro (1929); Becker (1967), ch. 3 spécialement; Barducci (1979), 187-194.

! Barbadoro (1929), 629-666.
> Monte Comune, Parte II, no. 3946.
° Ibid, £. 10v.
5. CREDITEURS DE FLORENCE EN 1347 99
crédit assigné au compte de cette personne, les crédits additionnels acquis

dans la période d’avril 1347 a janvier 1350/1, et ceux aliénés d’avril 1343
(quoiqu
une fiche ait une date bien antérieure, novembre 1337) a mai 1351,
avec deux entrées isolées de telles aliénations en janvier 1352 et août 1353.
Il est probable qu’a la date de la compilation du livre, les scribes consoli-
dérent tous les comptes d’un créditeur, enregistrant ainsi toutes les infor-
mations sur les crédits acquis, commencant plus ou moins de cette date.
Mais les aliénations semblent avoir inclus plusieurs transactions anté-
rieures, peut-être dans un effort pour assurer l’exactitude de la comptabili-
té de ces crédits.
Comment pourrait-on présenter la position sociale de ces créditeurs?
Dù à leur grand nombre, tout effort pour trouver des informations sur le
statut économique et social de ces personnes devait être mis de côté tout au
moins temporairement. Pourtant un sens approximatif de leur situation
générale pourrait se déduire d’un examen minutieux de leurs noms.’ Pour
commencer, on peut presque immédiatement identifier deux grandes caté-
gories d’actionnaires: ceux dont les noms incluent un toponyme et ceux qui
n’en ont point. Durant la période de presque quatre années comprise dans
ce livre le total de 3.048 personnes étaient cataloguées comme créditeurs
dans le Quartier du Santo Spirito; parmi celles-ci 996 ayant un toponyme
non Florentin attaché a leur nom. Dans notre analyse, ces actionnaires
seront considérés dans une catégorie spéciale, et pour faciliter le travail,
nous les mentionnerons en tant qu’actionnaires non urbains quoiqu’il soit
évident que peut-étre méme un grand nombre parmi eux étaient, tout au
moins temporairement, des résidents de la ville. Cependant, et dans notre
but, cette procédure pourrait étre justifiée, spécialement en vue de la réfé-
rence dans le décret législatif, aux résidents du contado et distretto dont les
comptes seraient inclus dans ce registre. Nous devons préciser que parmi
ces 996 créditeurs non Florentins, seuls huit d’entre eux étaient “forenses”
et je les ai inclus dans le groupe plus grand des contadini et distrettuali.
Les 2.052 actionnaires restants portent un toponyme non Florentin atta-
ché a leurs noms et on peut supposer quils étaient des “cives”.8 On peut les
7 Barbadoro (1929), 653, mentionne un “ceto capitalistico” et “l’artigianato” comme for-

mant les principaux groupes sociaux engagés dans les affaires du Monte. Il est clair qu’une
telle catégorisation réductive a besoin d’un certain raffinement. Barducci (1979), 202-217, a
tout a fait raison quand il écrit, p. 206, que “i componenti della ‘gente nuova’” étaient les
“maggiori partecipanti ai profitti della finanza comunale dopo la creazione del Monte.” J’ar-
rive bien a la méme conclusion dans ma propre étude.
8 Quatorze fiches ont clairement des toponymes florentins: San Felice en Piazza, Borgo
Ognissanti, etc. Ceux-ci ont ‘manifestement été inclus dans la catégorie des actionnaires
urbains.
séparer en cing groupes distincts et il est possible de commencer a analyser

les grandes lignes de leurs modes d’investissement et méme leur stratégies
sur base de l’évidence a notre disposition. Le tableau 1 présente la premiè-
re série de données, divisées selon les catégories formulées pour cette étude.
On pourrait suggérer que chacun de ces groupes possédait des traits
sociaux identifiables, ou que, peut-être tout simplement, l’identité publique
des membres de chacun de ces groupes onomastiques transmettait un sens
de leur statut social.
TABLEAD.1
CREANCIERS GROUPES SELON DES DONEES ONOMASTIQUES
Nombre — Ville |Nombre — Non-Ville

Avec “dei” 1
258
précédant le dernier nom
072 8
Pere 829 05
Nom de Baptéme seulement 0
425 2
Total 2052 96
-
6
Le fait d’avoir un nom de famille, au moins dans la premiére moitié du

quatorzième siècle, était une claire indication de distinction sociale: cela
indiquait l’existence d’une conscience de lignage, d’antécédents élevés. Peu
de personnes dans la première moitié du quatorzième siècle portaient des
noms de famille; dans notre lot, ceux portant un nom de famille sans équi-
voque représentaient seulement un peu plus de 12% des résidents de la
ville qui possédaient des investissements du Monte. Dans notre cas ils por-
taient des noms tels que Bardi, Canigiani, Frescobaldi, Nerli, Quaratesi,
Rossi et autres similaires. Après ce groupe, il y en a un plus substantiel
numériquement, comprenant légèrement plus du quart de tous les action-
naires de la ville. Ceux-ci étaient des individus dont l’enregistrement
incluait les noms des pères et grands-pères, en plus naturellement des leurs.
Certainement, dans un nombre de cas, la distinction entre les personnes
dans cette seconde catégorie et celles de la première n’est pas très claire. Un
nombre de noms de grands-pères dans ce second groupe aurait pu peut-
être tout aussi bien être considérés comme des noms de famille. Certaine-
ment, vers la fin du quatorzième siècle et pendant le quinzième siècle, beau-

coup de noms de famille étaient basés sur les noms de baptéme des
ancétres. Par exemple, ceci était le cas des Alamani, Banchi, Biliotti, Ceder-
ni et Lotteringhi, et pour chacun desquels on peut identifier un Alamano,
Banco, Biliotto, Cederno et Lotteringo qui vivaient vers la fin du treizième
siècle ou au début du quatorzième siècle. Pourtant, en plaçant des indivi-
dus dans chacun des sous-groupes, j'ai suivi ce qui m’a paru être le soin du
scribe en incluant le partitif “de” dans quelques noms et non pas dans
d’autres. On considérait ceux dont le second nom après le leur n’était pas
précédé d’un partitif comme ne possédant pas de nom de famille. Ainsi, par
exemple, Alexander Vannio Lotteringhi était considéré comme n’ayant pas
de nom de famille, “Lotteringhi” était présumable ment la forme du géni-
tif du nom de baptéme de son grand-père Lotteringo; par contraste,
“Alexander Bernardi de’ Bardis” était clairement un membre de la grande
lignée des Bardi. Le troisième groupe d’actionnaires urbains incluait tous
ceux qui, en plus de leurs noms de baptême, n'étaient identifiés que par le
nom de baptême de leurs pères. Aucun de ceux-ci n’avait d’autre signe
identifiable après leur nom, ni le nom d’un grand père ni une occupation.
Si la distinction entre le premier et le second groupe était la conscience de
lignée donnée par les noms de famille du premier groupe, la distinction
entre le second et le troisième pouvait se justifier par une plus grande exten-
sion de la mémoire généalogique et le début d’un sens de tradition familia-
le (sinon de lignage) transmis par le nom du grand-père. Dans notre brève
analyse, nous avons groupé toutes les personnes enregistrées par les scribes
du Monte par leur seul nom de baptême, sans autres marques d’identifica-
tion, avec les membres du troisième groupe, i.e. ceux enregistrés seulement
par leurs propres noms et les noms de leurs pères. Le quatrième groupe
principal d’actionnaires a été choisi sur base d’une marque d'identité, leur
occupation. Quelques-uns de ces individus étaient identifiés par le nom de
leurs grands-pères, et d’autres ne l’étaient pas. Mais tous avaient en com-
mun un sens d’identité professionnelle, si le nom de leur occupation était
devenu une partie intégrale de leur persona publique. En plus de ces quatre
groupes, j'ai voulu analyser séparément l’expérience des femmes, dont il y
avait un petit nombre, et qui, en tout cas, avaient déjà été comptées dans les
quatre groupes précédents.
Le tableau 2 présente quelque évidence appropriée sur base de laquelle
il est possible d’observer les modes d’investissement parmi les membres de
chaque groupe. Nous voulons observer non seulement les sommes (cumu-
latives et par personne) investies dans la dette publique mais aussi, peut-
être plus encore, l’histoire de ces placements durant la période mentionnée
dans ce volume. Et nous-allons procéder dans notre analyse en posant trois
simples questions. Comment les modes d’investissement des groupes peu-
vent-ils se comparer entre eux au début des enregistrements? Seconde-

ment, quelle était l’attitude des membres des groupes envers leurs place-
ments au Monte durant les années mentionnées dans ce registre? Troisième,
comment leurs positions avaient-elles comparativement changé lorsqu’en
1351, la majorité des enregistrements était venue à terme? Ou, si nous
posons la question différemment, comment la composition sociale de la
classe des actionnaires avait-elle changé entre 1347 et 1351?
Avant d’entreprendre cette analyse, un autre point préliminaire est
nécessaire. Nous avons dit plus haut que 3048 actionnaires sont enregistrés
dans le volume considéré ici, 2.052 cives et 996 n’ayant pas de toponyme
Florentin attaché a leurs noms. Mais parmi ces individus tous n’étaient pas
des créditeurs du gouvernement au début de l’enregistrement dans le livre.
131 personnes joignirent les rangs des créditeurs du Monte au cours des
quatre années suivantes, 119 étaient des citoyens et 12 ne l’étaient proba-
blement pas. Il est important de penser aux nombres des actionnaires du
Monte qui fluctuaient à travers le temps car ce sont les changements dans
les listes du Monte qui offrent l’un des apercus les plus intéressants de l’his-
toire de la dette publique de Florence.
Ce qui ressort manifestement des données du Tableau 2, c’est l’hétéro-
généité de la base sociale des actionnaires du Monte. Comme l’avaient déjà
mentionné Giovanni et Matteo Villani, on trouve un grand nombre d’arti-
sans et de gens modestes tout aussi bien de la ville comme de la campagne;
et beaucoup d’entre eux avaient placé de petites sommes au Monte. Beau-
coup de ces placements étaient de moins de 5 florins. 350 de ces action-
naires, dont seuls 38 étaient de la ville, avaient recu un crédit pour un flo-
rin. Les autres 312, ou presque un tiers des actionnaires non urbains, appar-
tenaient à ce groupe. À l’autre extrémité nous avons un petit nombre d’ac-
tionnaires majeurs; cinq des plus importants possédaient collectivement
8.953 florins, a peine moins des 9.334 florins que les 1.166 actionnaires
urbains possédaient et qui avaient recu un crédit de moins de 20 florins.
Trois de ces cinq actionnaires faisaient parti du clan des Bardi, Bindo de
Iacopo, Iacopo de Vieri, et messer Rodolfo. Depuis sa fondation, la dette
publique de Florence privilégiait les intéréts de la population urbaine. En
effet, ces actionnaires non urbains tendaient généralement vers une attitu-
de d’observateurs passifs, et participaient rarement au marché secondaire
en crédits du Monte. Parmi les 312 actionnaires non urbains ayant origina-
lement un crédit d’un seul florin, 268 n’indiquérent aucune activité (ni
achat ni vente) des crédits du Monte dans les quatre années suivantes.
En plus de la présence d’un vaste spectrum social parmi les actionnaires
originaux du Monte, il y avait aussi une vive prépondérance du groupe dont
les membres, dans les années 1340, portaient des noms de famille. Il y avait
244 actionnaires portant des noms de famille (8,4% de tous les action-
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naires, ou 12,6% des actionnaires de la ville, qui possédaient collectivement

26.149 florins (19,8% de tous les crédits, ou 21,7% de tous les crédits
urbains). Le placement de capitaux parmi des membres de ce groupe attei-
gnait 107 florins par personne, contre une moyenne de 62 florins pour tous
les actionnaires de la ville. A l’autre extrémité se trouvaient les 984 action-
naires hors de la ville, presque un tiers (33,7%)-de tous les participants,
mais qui ne possédaient collectivement plus de 11.378 florins (un peu plus
de 8,6% des placements originaux) et dont la moyenne n’était que de 12
florins. Les statistiques justificatives pour chacun des autres groupes ono-
mastiques apparaissent dans le Tableau 2. Selon ces données il est évident
qu'une bien claire hiérarchie prédominait parmi ces groupes au moment de
la fondation du Monte: dans la distribution par personne des investisse-
ments, le groupe portant des noms de famille précédait ceux identifiés par
les noms de leurs pères, et grands-pères suivis par ceux identifiés seulement
par les noms de leurs pères, et puis ceux ayant une occupation, et à la fin,
ceux qui portaient un toponyme non florentin avec leurs noms. Si l’on
considère les femmes en tant qu'un groupe à part, les actionnaires de
familles urbaines, avec un investissement par personne de 22 florins occu-
peraient une position médiane entre les deux groupes et le bas de la hié-
rarchie.
Avant d’essayer de comprendre le comportement de ces actionnaires
pendant les quatre années mentionnées dans notre registre, peut-être serait-
il préférable de considérer la situation comme elle se présentait en 1351. En
comparaison aux quatre années précédentes, plusieurs changements impor-
tants sont évidents. Tandis qu’en 1347 la valeur totale des crédits du Monte
appartenant aux actionnaires enregistrés originalement dans le Quartier de
Santo Spirito atteignait 131.970 florins (dont 120.592 enregistrés en tant
qu’actionnaires urbains)”, au moment de la clôture du livre, la valeur du
Monte crédité aux résidents de ce quartier n’avait atteint que 84.817 florins,
presque 36% en moins de la valeur originale.!° Deux facteurs sont à la base
de cette diminution: une somme de 19.130 florins appliquée au paiement
de nouveaux impôts, suivant une méthode largement employée plus tard
pour défalquer des fractions de la dette publique en les passant au débit
d'impôts (et d'emprunts forcés). Nous reviendrons bientôt au marché
secondaire de crédits gouvernementaux. Ce qui vaut la peine de noter ici
? Il y a une légère contradiction entre mes sommes et celles du scribe qui, dans f. 10v,
écrivit que la somme totale des crédits des résidents du Santo Spirito atteignait 129.151 f.
! Ce volume de créditeurs (et aussi bien les trois autres volumes correspondants aux
trois autres quartiers de la ville) ne mentionne pas le type d'opération complexe et bien pro-
fitable de la restitution du capital, décrit par Barducci (1979), 190-192.
c'est que le Quartier de Santo Spirito semble avoir souffert une perte évi-
dente en relation aux trois autres quartiers de la ville mais cette impression
ne sera confirmée que lorsque les données pour tous les actionnaires de la
ville seront proprement réunies et étudiées.!! Le fait est que pendant
approximativement une période de quatre années, la valeur des crédits
contrôlés par les résidents du Quartier de Santo Spirito avait sensiblement
diminué.
Le second changement est certainement plus frappant: la grande dimi-
nution du nombre des créditeurs de la ville. Certainement le nombre de cré-
diteurs du dehors de la ville diminue aussi, de 984 à 770, une réduction de
plus d’un cinquième. Mais la situation change aussi plus notablement parmi
les actionnaires de la ville. Il y avait 1933 de ces créditeurs dans les livres du
Santo Spirito en 1347. En 1351 il n’y en avait que 962. Ainsi la réduction de
la valeur des crédits du Monte s’accompagnait d’une perte encore plus dra-
matique du nombre de créditeurs. Nous ne pouvons pas étre complètement
certains des raisons de la disparition de tant de gens des tableaux des crédi-
teurs du Monte. La grande épidémie de 1348 était sans doute en partie res-
ponsable de ce changement. On pourrait soupconner l’intervention d’autres
forces. Les justifications présentées par les scribes au moment du transfert
des crédits et leur enregistrement dans les comptes de nouveaux ayant droit
suggèrent que, en dépit de l’impact de la mortalité largement répandue,
d’autres facteurs étaient responsables de cette réduction. Nous avons de
telles justifications dans les cas de 1.114 crédits transférés de leurs proprié-
taires originaux à leurs nouveaux propriétaires. Dans bien plus de la moitié
de ces explications (621 cas) le registre indique que le propriétaire des cré-
dits avait autorisé le transfert tandis que dans seulement 364 cas la mort du
propriétaire original avait causé ce changement de propriétaire. (Dans le
reste des cas, l’explication de la cause du transfert du crédit n’est pas claire).
Ainsi il semblerait que la réduction du nombre de créditeurs était le résultat
non seulement du transfert de possession causé par la Peste mais aussi des
opérations d’un marché secondaire en crédits gouvernementaux dont lhis-
toire est clairement illustrée dans le registre. En effet, des 1.249 aliénations
enregistrées dans ce livre, 1.034 (82,8% du total) ont une date antérieure à
l'apparition de la grande Peste à Florence, en avril 1348.
En plus de ces changements, il y en avait encore un plus important, la
distribution encore plus inégale des crédits restants parmi leurs proprié-
taires. En 1351, 1.092 actionnaires urbains et 224 du dehors de la ville
!! Cette hypothèse est renforcée par le fait que parmi les crédits du Monte aliénés par
des résidents de Santo Spirito, seuls 41% des nouveaux propriétaires dont le “quartier” de
residence est connu (493 sur 1.204) étaient dans le livre de Santo Spirito.
étaient restés sans aucun crédit. Les aliénations, et dans certains cas les
paiements d’impòts avaient consommé leur investissement original. Au
contraire, la portion de la fortune du Monte concentrée au sommet de la
hiérarchie des créditeurs avait augmenté largement. En 1347, les cinq
actionnaires placés tout au haut de la hiérarchie et que dans le but de cette
analyse nous avons classifié comme résidents de la ville, contrôlaient 8.953
florins, 7,4% de tous les crédits du Monte contrôlés par des urbains.
Quatre ans plus tard, les cing actionnaires au sommet (parmi lesquels on
trouve d’une maniére peut-étre significative un seul membre de la famille
des Bardi) possédaient 12.268 florins, 16,3% des crédits du Monte contrò-
lés par des actionnaires urbains. De plus, tandis que pour les actionnaires
urbains le crédit par personne en moyenne avait été de 62 florins, en 1351
il s'était élevé d’un quart, à 78 florins. Cette évidence suggère fortement
que la mal distribution sociale des crédits du Monte au quinzième siècle
avait de longs précédents qui remontaient au tout début de l’histoire du
Monte. C’est un fait bien connu que les dettes publiques attirent les res-
sources matérielles des rangs les plus bas de la société et les poussent vers
le haut. Ceci a été certainement le cas en ce qui concerne la dette publique
de Florence.
Ce processus a commencé dès son établissement, malgré la présence
dans les listes initiales du Monte d’un certain nombre de gens modestes de
la ville et de la campagne.
Le dernier changement significatif concerne la condition sociale parmi
les groupes onomastiques où j'ai placé ces créditeurs. Vers 1351 les action-
naires portant des noms de famille avaient perdu une grande partie de leur
avantage comparatif antérieur. Tandis que le crédit moyen d’un actionnaire
urbain s'était élevé d’un quart de 62 à 78 florins, l'investissement par per-
sonne d’actionnaires ayant un nom de famille avait changé fort peu, de 107
à 109 florins (moins de 2%). Comme le démontre le Tableau 2, le contras-
te avec les actionnaires qui ne portaient pas de nom de famille mais qui
s’identifiaient par les noms de leurs pères et grands-pères est frappant. Les
membres de ce groupe avaient vu leurs investissements par personne
croître de presque 58%, de 76 à 120 florins, tandis que la portion de la
somme totale de la dette entre les mains urbaines, contrôlée par ce groupe
s'était élevée de 28% à 38%. De plus, en considérant le rang social de tous
les groupes d’actionnaires, aussi bien en ce qui concerne l'investissement
par personne et la portion de la dette totale dans la propriété collective de
chaque groupe, les groupes onomastiques comprenant les personnes sans
noms de famille mais dont la mémoire généalogique atteignait le niveau de
leurs grands-pères avaient surpassé tous les autres. Bref, les membres d’une
ancienne élite bien établie, lesquels avaient dominé et largement fourni les
fonds pour les opérations de leur gouvernement pendant une ère oligar-
chique antérieure, étaient maintenant surpassés par ce large groupe de gens

que les chroniqueurs et les historiens avaient appelés “novi cives” et qui,
pendant la décade turbulente des années 1340, à la suite de remous poli-
tiques, de désastre économique et de catastrophe naturelle, s’efforcaient de
s'imposer dans la politique de leur ville.” Il y a, je le soupçonne, peu
d’exemples qui exemplifient mieux le changement dans le panorama poli-
tique vers la moitié du quatorziéme siécle que cette modification dans la
hiérarchie des actionnaires du Monte.
Quelles seraient les raisons de ces changements pendant la période rela-
tivement bréve mentionnée dans notre registre? Deux causes se présentent
immédiatement a l’esprit: les conséquences dévastatrices de la mortalité
épidémique et les opérations d’un marché de commerce de crédits gouver-
nementaux. La première de ces causes est difficile à évaluer, tout au moins
sur base de l’évidence à notre disposition. On peut conclure qu’en ceci,
comme pour beaucoup d’autres manifestations de la vie florentine a la fin
des années 1340, la mort desmilliers de personnes, la relative dépopulation
de la ville, méme en contraste avec quelques années avant, et les bénéfices
accrus aux survivants, tout contribues à la création de l’image évoquée dans
les paragraphes précédents. Pourtant comme je l’ai indiqué plus haut, l’in-
formation contenue dans notre registre suggère qu’au delà de la mortalité,
d’autres facteurs contribuèrent aussi à la transformation du portrait collec-
tif des créditeurs du Monte dans le Quartier de Santo Spirito. Et l’un d’eux,
si rien d’autre, le fait que la majorité des transferts du Monte pour lesquels
nous avons des données, furent conclus avant l'apparition de la Peste, atti-
re notre attention sur l'existence, immédiatement après l'établissement de
la dette publique, d’un marché secondaire florissant en crédits gouverne-
mentaux.
Le contenu de notre registre indique bien le fonctionnement de ce mar-
ché et fait ressortir un groupe d’actionnaires qui restèrent largement inac-
tifs pendant les années suivant leur enregistrement en tant que créditeurs
de la ville, un autre groupe qui paraît avoir aliéné leurs crédits presque
immédiatement après leur enregistrement, et un autre groupe encore
consistant largement de personnes qui n’avaient pas possédé initialement
de crédits et qui très rapidement se mirent à spéculer sur les crédits du
Monte.
Comme je l’ai déjà mentionné, il y avait 2.917 actionnaires en 1347. Un
peu moins de quatre années plus tard, 1.264 parmi ceux-ci avaient été éli-
minés des listes des créditeurs du gouvernement, 217 du dehors de la ville,
et 1047 de la ville même. Il est intéressant de noter que les créditeurs non
12 Dans ce cas, mon évidence correspond à la conclusion de Barducci (1979), 205-206.

urbains, ayant le moindre investissement moyen en comparaison avec celui

des autres groupes, tendaient à garder leurs crédits, ils ne les aliénaient
point ni en ajoutaient. Presque quatre sur cing (78%) actionnaires non
urbains enregistrés en 1347 étaient encore des créditeurs en 1351. Le
contraste avec les actionnaires urbains est frappant: en 1351 seulement
46% des actionnaires originaux restaient dans les listes des créditeurs du
gouvernement. On peut imaginer que plusieurs raisons menèrent à la pas-
sivité des actionnaires non urbains: la distance depuis le centre d’opérations
du gouvernement, et l’ignorance des moyens nécessaires pour aliéner leurs
crédits très probablement étaient la cause en grande partie de leur inactivi-
té. Les actionnaires urbains, méme les artisans modestes et les ouvriers
avaient plus de possibilités de se familiariser avec les méthodes de fonc-
tionnement du gouvernement et pouvaient plus aisément avoir quelque
argent comptant, ou payer leurs impôts en aliénant leurs crédits. Notons
aussi que les deux groupes dont les membres tendaient à perdre leur parti-
cipation dans les listes du Monte en plus grand nombre étaient les action-
naires ayant des noms de famille et ceux ayant une occupation. Parmi ceux
qui étaient actifs en 1347, trois sur cinq (60%) ayant des noms de famille
en 1347, et presque une fraction égale (57%) de ceux ayant une occupation
avaient cessé d’être des créditeurs en 1351. En contraste, 52% de ceux
identifiés par les noms de leurs pères et grands-pères (252 des 485 origi-
naux), et un pourcentage égal (415 des 798) de ceux identifiés par les noms
de leurs pères seulement n'étaient plus sur les registres des créditeurs en
1351. Bref, quelles que furent les conséquences de la mortalité due à l’épi-
démie, les opérations du marché, surtout le différent degré de participation
des divers groupes d’actionnaires dans ce marché, résulta en un change-
ment de la composition sociale du groupe de créditeurs du gouvernement.
Le registre du Monte indique aussi l’existence d’un groupe de résidents
de Santo Spirito qui s’engagèrent intensément dans le commerce de crédits
du Monte. Les plus frappants parmi ceux-ci étaient 131 actionnaires, 124
de la ville et sept du dehors, et qui ne possédaient pas de crédits au moment
de la consolidation de la dette publique. Le registre du Monte amplement
documente leur engagement dans l’achat et la vente de crédits. Ces 131 cré-
diteurs ensemble acquirent dans le marché 45.369 florins de crédits; et alié-
nèrent à des troisièmes parties 25.747 florins. En 1351, 52 de ces action-
naires s'étaient retirés du marché (ou ils étaient décédés et leurs crédits
avaient été hérités par d’autres). Le reste des 79 créditeurs étaient res-
© De ceux-ci, 30 étaient eux-mêmes présents lors de la dernière aliénation de leurs cré-

dits, 3 étaient morts et leurs crédits inscrits dans les comptes de leurs héritiers, et pour les der-
niers 19 il ne ressort pas clairement s’ils étaient encore en vie à la fermeture de leurs comptes.
ponsables pour un total de 303 acquisitions et 49 aliénations; à l’époque de

la fermeture du registre, ils possédaient ensemble 19.113 florins des crédits
du Monte, en moyenne par personne d’une somme substantielle de 242 flo-
rins. Parmi ceux-ci, six avaient des noms de famille, 34 étaient identifiés
avec les noms de leurs pères et grands-pères, 26 avec les noms seulement de
leurs pères, et 13 avaient une occupation. Cette partie de notre évidence
indique aussi clairement le dégagement relatif des anciennes familles
renommées des affaires du Monte et l’émergence d’un groupe de nouveaux
venus, qu’il ne serait pas injuste de définir en tant que spéculateurs en cré-
dits gouvernementaux.
Naturellement, nos données indiquent aussi bien l’engagement actif
dans ce marché d’un nombre de créditeurs originaux. De ceux-ci, parmi les
résidents de Santo Spirito, Pierus Vannozzi Baronis était de beaucoup le
plus actif. Son activité presque frénétique est bien mise à jour par le fait
que, en moins de deux ans, d’avril 1349, quand il débuta sur le marché, a
janvier 1350/1, il acheta des crédits par 134 transactions distinctes, et fit 37
ventes. En tout il acquit 17.183 florins, aliéna 12.651 florins et a la ferme-
ture du registre, son compte avait l’énorme somme de 4.532 florins, plus de
5,3% de toute la dette publique assumée par tous les résidents de Santo
Spirito.!! Parmi les autres spéculateurs, Sander Cherichini, “aurifex” et
Landus Pegolotti étaient les plus importants parmi les résidents de Santo
Spirito. Mais notre registre identifie aussi un nombre de spéculateurs rési-
dant dans d’autres Quartiers qui étaient aussi actifs sur le marché. Quoique
leurs comptes soient inclus dans les registres de leurs propres Quartiers,
nous pouvons retracer leurs transactions et le nombre de crédits qu'ils
acquirent des résidents de Santo Spirito. Parmi eux, trois membres de la
lignée des Guidalotti résidant dans les quartiers de Santa Maria Novella et
de San Giovanni, avaient jointement fait 156 achats de crédits du Monte
seulement des résidents de Santo Spirito, pour la somme totale de bien plus
de la valeur de 2.000 florins de crédits du Monte.”
Pour compléter leurs transactions, ces spéculateurs étaient souvent aidés
par des procureurs, fondés de pouvoirs, des personnes qui avaient le droit
légal d’agir pour le compte de leurs clients. En effet, dans le cas de 374 alié-
nations, le scribe inclut le nom de la personne nantie du pouvoir d’agir pour
le compte du propriétaire des crédits. Notons aussi que cing de ces procu-
reurs étaient responsables pour trois sur quatre transactions enregistrées
(282 sur 374). Il est difficile de définir avec précision la relation de ces per-
4 Les activités spéculatives de Piero ont été montrées premièrement par Barducci
(1970) AS}. :
15 Sur les Guidalotti, voir Barbadoro (1929), 652, no. 1.
sonnes avec les propriétaires des crédits aliénés ou avec les nouveaux
actionnaires. Dans certains cas il apparaît clairement que les procureurs
étaient apparentés aux principaux intéressés des transactions. Ceci parait
être le cas de Lapo Lippi de’ Guidalotti qui, dans cing différentes occasions
de novembre 1339 à août 1340, agit en tant que fondé de pouvoir de Gui-
dalotto Uberti de’ Guidalotti, qui acquit la somme de 60 crédits de cing
créditeurs différents. Mais Lapo agit aussi comme procureur une sixième
fois, pour le compte de Bettus Fesulanus, sur la personne de laquelle et sur
sa relation au procureur il ne nous est pas possible d’en savoir plus. Betto
était peut-étre un parent de Lapo, ou un ami, un voisin ou un dépendant.
Geri Vannis de Spinis, résident du Quartier de Santa Maria Novella fut le
fondé de pouvoirs dans 40 différentes transactions de son frére, Manetto,
et dans ce cas-ci, aussi bien, il est clair que la procuration résultait du lien
de famille entre les deux hommes. Dans d’autres cas il semble que les pro-
cureurs étaient des entremetteurs professionnels (“sensali” quoique le
document ne les nomme pas sous ce titre) qui, fort probablement contre
certains honoraires, agissaient pour le compte de leurs clients. Bindus
Ducci n’était pas vraisemblablement apparenté à aucun des commettants
dans les neuf transactions où il agit comme fondé de pouvoirs. Filippus
Andree Nerini non plus ne parait avoir eu aucun lien de famille avec les cré-
diteurs qu’il représenta dans 4 transactions. Finalement, Filippus Ughi de
Vecchiettis, procureur dans 78 différentes transactions, représenta souvent
Michele Litti de’ Guidalotti, mais aussi souvent il agit pour le compte
d’autres créditeurs, très probablement ses clients.
A la fin de ce bref apercu, nous pouvons dériver certaines observations,
méme si elles ne sont que préliminaires et tentatives sur le premier groupe
de créditeurs du Monte dans le quartier de Santo Spirito. Tout d’abord, le
contenu du registre analysé ci haut suggére que Giovanni et Matteo Villa-
ni, et Marchione di Coppo Stefani étaient bien perspicaces quand ils indi-
quèrent le fond social varié des Florentins qui investirent initialement dans
la dette publique de leur ville. Presque 3.000 de ces actionnaires venaient
dun seul des “quartiers” de la ville; probablement y avait-il plus de 13.000
de toute la ville. Le nombre et la diversité de cette classe d’actionnaire sont
vraiment impressionnantes. Mais aussi impressionnant semble étre le pro-
cédé par lequel la base sociale de cette classe se rétrécit — en nombres et en
provenance sociale. Il semble que la dette publique commença à se concen-
trer en moins de mains, pour la plupart entre les mains de relativement nou-
veaux venus dans l’arène politique de la ville, presque immédiatement après
son établissement. Il sera important de poursuivre cette observation par
d’autres études, et de chercher à comprendre plus clairement qu’il ne la été
possible ici, influence que le marché de crédits du gouvernement eut sur
cette diminution, bien au-delà des conséquences de l’épidémie massive des
5. CREDITEURS DE FLORENCE EN 1347 ital
années 1348-49. Certainement, comme Roberto Barducci fut le premier a

l’indiquer, il semblerait ressortir de cette analyse bien rapide que des spé-
culateurs et des entrepreneurs se mirent a l’œuvre presque immédiatement
après l’institutionnalisation de la dette publique pour profiter de son exis-
tence et des amples possibilités de profit apparentes qu’elle offrait si l’on
s engageait, souvent très activement et intensément, dans le commerce de
ces crédits. En effet, presque dès le début même de l’histoire de la dette
publique, le gouvernement était parvenu a introduire dans le marché flo-
rentin — tout comme on l’avait déjà fait à Gênes et a Venise — d’un nouveau
genre de système monétaire que l’on pouvait employer comme devise sup-
pléante, dans le but d’alléger la pénurie chronique d’espèces dont souf-
fraient les économies de la fin du Moyen Age. Une analyse du volume des
créditeurs de Santo Spirito dans les années 1340s suggére comme d’autres
historiens l’avaient indiqué non seulement pour la ville de Florence, le
caractère vital du lien entre le développement institutionnel de l’état, les
finances publiques, et l’émergence des classes dirigeantes dont les membres
profitaient souvent économiquement et politiquement grace a la facilité de
leur accès à la dette publique.
6:
LAMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO
AEIRENZE NEW OUINDICESIMO'SEGOLO
Alla memoria di Elio Conti
In questo saggio, propongo di concentrarmi su un problema ben preci-

so e, secondo me, di importanza centrale nello svolgimento delle finanze
pubbliche fiorentine nel XV secolo: la stabilizzazione e la graduale diminu-
zione del debito pubblico. Infine cercherò di suggerire qualche possibile
collegamento tra la mia esposizione di problemi fiscali e tendenze più vaste
nello svolgimento della storia fiorentina del Quattrocento.
Possiamo cominciare la nostra indagine presentando certi dati, di
carattere prevalentemente statistico, che non sempre sono spiegabili dalla
conoscenza storiografica oggi a nostra disposizione. Quando nel quinto
decennio del XIV secolo il debito pubblico fiorentino fu consolidato, il
suo valore redimibile si approssimava a mezzo milione di fiorini. Nell’ar-
co della generazione seguente il Monte Comune quasi raddoppiò. In effet-
ti, sappiamo da una clausola inserita in una provvisione promulgata nel
1380 che l'ammontare del debito pubblico aveva raggiunto la somma di
circa un milione di fiorini. Questa crescita dell’indebitamento comunale
proseguì in modo continuo e molto accentuato nei primi decenni del seco-
lo seguente. Sappiamo che nel 1411 il valore redimibile raggiunto dal
debito pubblico fiorentino aveva passato i tre milioni di fiorini e che al
momento del primo Catasto nel 1427 il valore fiscale denunciato dai cit-
tadini fiorentini per i loro crediti del Monte si aggirava su questa somma.
Questi dati sono ben conosciuti grazie ai lavori di vari studiosi come il
Barbadoro, Becker, Brucker, e più recentemente Barducci. Secondo la
prospettiva sviluppata da questi studiosi — principalmente Becker — e
! Tranne quelle poche eccezioni indicate nelle note apposite, tutti i documenti citati si
trovano nell’Archivio di Stato di Firenze. I riferimenti alle filze dell'Archivio del Monte
Comune, pure queste collocate nell'Archivio di Stato, sono ad un inventario provvisorio
redatto da chi scrive durante l’anno accademico 1971-1972. Copia di questo inventario si
trova nella Sala di Lettura del suddetto Archivio.
adottata anche dallo storico inglese Louis Marks, la crescita del debito
pubblico fiorentino avrebbe dovuto continuare nel quindicesimo secolo.
In conclusione, il Monte avrebbe inglobato quasi tutte le entrate comuna-
li necessarie per soddisfare i ceti creditizi, i quali avevano esteso il loro cre-
dito verso il loro governo consentendo di pagare i prestiti forzosi ad essi
imposti dal comune.’ >
Se, però, indaghiamo sulle sorti del Monte nel XV secolo scopriamo
una situazione abbastanza inattesa. Nel novembre 1465 il valore totale dei
crediti del Monte di proprietà privata era di 3.533.924 fiorini. Dieci anni
dopo, nel maggio 1476, il loro valore era rimasto quasi immutato:
3.679.336 fiorini. Pressappoco la stessa situazione prevaleva agli inizi del
secolo seguente: nel 1511, anche dopo le costosissime guerre finanziate da
Firenze in seguito all'invasione francese, il valore totale del debito pubbli-
co controllato da creditori privati rimaneva sotto i quattro milioni di fio-
rini, precisamente 3.939.182. L'immagine di un debito pubblico stabiliz-
zato intorno a una cifra tra i tre e i quattro milioni di fiorini è rinforzata
da un’altra serie di dati statistici. Nei primi anni del Quattrocento l’in-
troito della gabella delle porte e della dogana riusciva a coprire, sì e no,
metà della spesa necessaria per finanziare il debito pubblico. Così, nel
1411 questa gabella produsse l’introito di 88.523 fiorini, il 37,77 per cento
di quello che il comune spese (234.712 fiorini) per soddisfare i suoi credi-
tori. Questa percentuale salì al 50,38 per cento nel 1420 e scese di nuovo
al 42,23 per cento nel 1424.’ Cento anni dopo, la situazione era cambiata
in modo piuttosto drammatico. Nel 1511, il comune spese 87.920 fiorini
per pagare gli interessi dovuti ai creditori del Monte; nello stesso anno, la
gabella delle porte e della dogana produsse un introito di 121.976 fiorini,
cioè il 139,73 per cento di quello necessario per finanziare il debito pub-
blico.
La percentuale salì al 145,92 per cento nel 1520 e riscese a 136,88 per
cento nel 1524.° La domanda che deve essere posta da uno storico delle
finanze pubbliche fiorentine del Quattrocento riguarda il metodo usato dal
? Sul consolidamento del Monte, Barbadoro (1929), 629-687. Sulle vicende del Monte
nella seconda metà del XIV secolo, Becker (1965), 433-466; Becker (1966), 7-39: Barducci
(1979); Barducci (1981); Marks (1960). Sulla storia delle finanze pubbliche a Firenze nei
primi decenni del quindicesimo secolo, consultare anche Molho (1971).
> Carte di Corredo 24, ff. 31r-v.
4 Miscellanea Repubblicana 7, f. 1v.
> Le cifre per i primi decenni del Quattrocento si trovano nel mio libro Molho (1971),
54, 61.
° Per gli anni 1511 e 1520 consultare Miscellanea Repubblicana 7. Per il 1524, BNF,
Deposito Peruzzi de’ Medici 231, ff. 421v-422r.
6. LAMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO iS)
governo per mettere sotto controllo la crescita del debito pubblico. Prima
di indagare sui meccanismi fiscali evidenti nella politica fiorentina dobbia-
mo sottolineare un altro fatto il quale complicò considerevolmente la
gestione del debito pubblico.
Questo debito fu creato in prima istanza, ed era cresciuto dal suo con-
solidamento fino agli inizi del XV secolo, per un motivo preciso, perché
cioè il governo fiorentino aveva basato la sua politica fiscale sulla riscossio-
ne di prestiti forzosi che imponeva ai suoi cittadini. Mentre sudditi, sia con-
tadini che distrettuali, pagavano le tasse dirette, cioè l’estimo, gli abitanti di
Firenze contribuivano alle spese del governo pagando le prestanze, cioè dei
prestiti forzosi, le quali venivano iscritte sul debito pubblico e sulle quali
percepivano un interesse, denominato dal governo le paghe del Monte.
Questo interesse fluttuava: nel XIV secolo il tasso nominale si aggirava sul
5 per cento, mentre all’inizio del secolo seguente era sceso lievemente sotto
il 4 per cento. Questo sistema deficitario continuò durante tutto il XV seco-
lo. L'istituzione del Catasto, cioè, non comportò un cambiamento radicale
nella gestione fiscale dello stato. Il Catasto ebbe come scopo non l’aboli-
zione del sistema deficitario ben radicato nelle tradizioni economiche e
politiche fiorentine, ma piuttosto riguardò il modo nel quale le prestanze
venivano distribuite tra i contribuenti.’
La stabilizzazione del debito pubblico fiorentino deve essere vista nel
contesto di una politica fiscale che privilegiava finanziamenti deficitari e
così contribuiva al continuo incremento del deficit comunale. Eppure,
come già visto, questo incremento non ebbe luogo. Il tempo limitato a
nostra disposizione non mi consente la possibilità di presentare un’esposi-
zione dettagliata della mia ipotesi sugli stratagemmi fiscali imposti dal
governo per portare a compimento una vasta operazione, la quale ebbe
come risultato la diminuzione delle spese necessarie per il finanziamento
del debito pubblico.
L'ipotesi che propongo in questa relazione è che il Comune si basò su
due strategie precise per raggiungere il suddetto risultato: 1° le manovre
condotte sul Monte delle doti, e 2° la monetizzazione parziale e sotto con-
dizioni ben precise del debito consolidato.
Il Monte delle doti fu creato nel 1425 e mantenne le sue operazioni per
quasi un secolo e mezzo. Dal punto di vista fiscale, nel creare il Monte
delle doti i legislatori fiorentini si ponevano lo scopo di poter attirare nelle
casse del fisco una certa somma di denaro liquido col quale alleggerire la
pressione fiscale che andava aumentando nel terzo decennio del Quattro-
cento — anni di guerre costosissime e quasi ininterrotte. Padri fiorentini
7 Sul Catasto, Molho (1971), 79-87; e Herlihy e Klapisch (1978), 33-34.

venivano invitati a depositare presso gli ufficiali del Monte una somma per
ognuna delle loro figlie. Questo deposito veniva fatto per periodi fissi,
rispettivamente stabiliti a 15, 11, 7 e 1/2 e 5 anni. Mentre i termini crono-
logici dei depositi erano fissi, l’ammontare del deposito, e quindi anche la
somma eventualmente maturata, erano scelte dal depositante. Alla fine del
periodo predeterminato e solo se la ragazza a nome della quale era stato
versato il deposito si fosse sposata e avesse consumato il matrimonio, il
valore maturato veniva pagato al marito. I tassi d’interesse promessi ai
depositanti nel corso del secolo fluttuarono, ma rimasero comunque alti in
confronto ai tassi d'interesse che prevalevano sul mercato fiorentino. Certo,
l'attrazione di tassi talmente alti era attenuata dalla regola secondo la quale
se la ragazza moriva o si monacava prima della data di maturazione del
deposito il depositante aveva il diritto di avere in restituzione soltanto la
somma originariamente versata. Ciononostante, migliaia di padri fiorentini
cercarono di approfittare dei guadagni cospicui che potevano essere realiz-
zati da un investimento nel Monte delle doti. Circa 20.000 ragazze furono
iscritte nel Monte durante il Quattrocento.3
Al momento della sua creazione, i legislatori fiorentini non avevano spe-
cificato il modo in cui il Monte delle doti avrebbe pagato le doti maturate
ai mariti. La legislazione del 1425 aveva semplicemente precisato che le doti
sarebbero state pagate «de quacunque pecunia... etiam deputata vel depu-
tanda tam pro solutione interesse cuiuscunque montis quam etiam pro
diminutione vere sortis cuiuscunque crediti montis».? Questa parte della
legislazione fu chiarita nel 1435, quando si decise che le somme versate dai
depositanti sarebbero state usate per acquistare crediti del debito pubblico
e per creare un conto denominato «creditum puellarum maritandarum».
Gli ufficiali del Monte avrebbero dovuto versare gli interessi accumulati in
questo conto come se fossero posseduti da cittadini privati. Così, mentre i
depositi maturavano, gli ufficiali del Monte avrebbero dovuto liquidare sul
mercato un numero sufficiente di crediti per percepire i contanti necessari
al pagamento delle doti maturate («Solvi debeant dotes... permutando et
alienando de dicto credito»).!° Il problema creato da questo sistema è abba-
stanza evidente. Mentre i tassi d’interesse promessi ai detentori di crediti
del Monte Comune erano piuttosto modesti — da circa 3,75 per cento negli
* Sulla ricerca, tuttora in corso, condotta da Julius Kirshner, Alan Morrison e chi scrive,
sul Monte delle Doti: Morrison, Kirshner and Molho, (1977); Morrison, Kirshner and
Molho, (1978); Morrison, Kirshner and Molho, (1980).
? Il testo della provvisione del 1425 (Provvisioni Registri 114, ff. 143r-144v) è stato pub-
blicato da Kirshner (1978), 60-65.
10 PR 126, ff 37103721
6. LAMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO 17
anni 20 a meno di 2,25 per cento allo scadere del secolo — gli interessi pro-
messi ai depositanti sul Monte delle doti, come già visto, erano molto più
elevati. Eppure, i due sistemi erano abbinati l’uno all’altro. È proprio l’esi-
stenza di questo divario tra i due tassi d’interesse che creava problemi
molto gravi per il Monte delle Doti. Certo, il Comune avrebbe potuto paga-
re le doti maturate se un numero elevato di ragazze fossero morte o si fos-
sero monacate prima che i loro depositi maturassero. Ma il numero effetti-
vo di queste ragazze era ben più basso di quanto non sarebbe stato neces-
sario perché il Monte funzionasse senza problemi.!! Una tale situazione non
poteva perdurare senza creare tensioni e squilibri nella vita fiscale e sociale
di Firenze.
Il problema del finanziamento delle doti divenne uno dei problemi scot-
tanti — sia dal punto di vista economico sia da quello politico — alla metà
del secolo. Questo, ovviamente, non era l’unico problema fiscale che si
poneva al governo in questo periodo, perché, come abbiamo già visto, il
finanziamento del debito pubblico comportava una spesa notevole ogni
anno. La congiunzione di questi due problemi — come pagare le doti matu-
rate e come finanziare un debito pubblico il quale consumava una frazione
cospicua delle rendite annue del Comune — determinò la reazione gover-
nativa negli anni Quaranta e Settanta.
Nel 1442 si prese la decisione di richiedere che i depositi sul Monte
delle doti fossero fatti in crediti del Monte comune, convertendo questi
secondo i valori di sconto prevalenti sul mercato.!? Questa manovra ebbe
come conseguenza l’alleggerimento del peso fiscale sopportato dal gover-
no. Prima del 1442 il Monte era obbligato a sborsare sia gli interessi dovu-
ti ai creditori del Monte comune, che le doti che progressivamente matu-
ravano e venivano richieste. Dopo quell’anno, una parte rilevante di fondi
originalmente utilizzati per il finanziamento del debito pubblico consoli-
dato venne impiegato per il Monte delle doti. Inoltre, i tassi d’interesse
promessi dal governo ai depositanti sul Monte delle doti furono, d’ora in
poi, abbinati ai tassi di sconto dei crediti del Monte comune prevalenti
sulla piazza. Anzi, come vedremo, per tutto il resto del secolo, il governo
approfittò dell’esistenza di un divario tra l’interesse promesso ai deposi-
tanti sul Monte delle doti e il tasso d’interesse effettivo, pagato dal gover-
no, sul valore scontato (cioè valore reale) dei crediti del Monte comune.
Per illustrare il sistema possiamo immaginare un caso avvenuto nel giugno
1442. In quel momento il Monte versava un tasso d’interesse annuo di 3,75
1 T tassi di mortalità e di monacazione sono riportati da Morrison, Kirshner and Molho

(1985).
2 PR. 132, tf. 6v-9r 133, ff. 126r-128r.
per cento su depositi del Monte comune, mentre questi stessi crediti veni-
vano scontati in piazza al 20 per cento. Effettivamente, cioè, il tasso d’in-
teresse sul valore reale dei crediti del Monte era cinque volte quello nomi-
nale, 18,75 per cento. In quello stesso periodo, un padre fiorentino per
dotare una sua figlia tramite il Monte avrebbe dovuto depositare 300 fio-
rinidi crediti di Monte comune, equivalenti a 60 fiorini di contanti, i quali
in quindici anni avrebbero maturato in una dote di 500 fiorini di contanti.
Ciò voleva dire che il tasso d’interesse composto promesso sui depositi
quindicennali del Monte delle doti ammontava a 14,4 per cento, 4,35 per
cento in meno di quanto non avrebbe pagato il comune sui crediti del
Monte comune. Questo divario tra i due tassi d’interesse (quello effettivo
sul valore scontato dei crediti del Monte comune e quello promesso sui
depositi fatti sul Monte delle doti) si mantenne per il resto del secolo, flut-
tuando tra valori piuttosto modesti (3,6 per cento nell’ultimo quadrimestre
del 1459) a valori ben più cospicui (8,6 per cento in agosto 1446). Ciò vole-
va dire che un investimento sul Monte delle doti non sarebbe stato tanto
proficuo quanto un investimento equivalente sul Monte comune. In più,
un deposito sul Monte delle doti esponeva l’investimento al rischio di per-
dere tutto l’interesse promesso dal governo se la ragazza per cui era stato
aperto il conto fosse morta o si fosse monacata.
Questa situazione ci propone due quesiti: se, effettivamente, il sistema
istituito dopo la riforma del 1442 era vantaggioso per l’amministrazione del
Monte, come spiegare le crisi quasi ininterrotte che colpirono le finanze del
Monte per tutto il resto del secolo? Secondariamente, come spiegare l’inte-
resse dei cittadini fiorentini a convertire i loro crediti del Monte comune in
depositi sul Monte delle doti?!
Un'analisi delle finanze pubbliche fiorentine nel quindicesimo secolo
rivela che, sin dagli inizi del secolo, il governo cercò di utilizzare i fondi del
Monte per supplire ai suoi bisogni fiscali in momenti di crisi. Questa ten-
denza inevitabilmente indebolì la capacità del Monte di pagare i suoi cre-
ditori senza ritardi e dilazioni. Linterferenza politica nell’amministrazione
del debito pubblico rappresenta un fatto costante, quasi un dato struttura-
le nella storia fiorentina, facilmente documentabile nel periodo che ci con-
cerne, cioè i decenni dopo la riforma del 1442. Così, per esempio, nel 1452
e nel 1453 paghe dovute sia ai creditori del Monte comune, che ai depositi
per le doti («creditum puellarum maritandarum») furono trattenute dal
5 Entro il 10 dicembre 1451, il Monte delle doti aveva già accumulato 2.542.747 fiorini
di crediti del Monte (NA, D 65, n. 62, f. 32v). Dal gennaio 1457/1458 al gennaio 1458/1459
il Monte delle doti era cresciuto da 5.069.570 a 5.747.798 fiorini. Per queste cifre vedere
Balie, 29, ff. 45r-47v, e Monte Comune 1399.
6. AMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO 119
governo per facilitare la conclusione della guerra contro Venezia e Napoli.!

Nello stesso anno si decise di convertire 300.000 fiorini dal credito del
Monte delle doti per assegnare gli interessi di questa somma agli stipendi di
magistrati fiorentini a Pisa. Esempi come questi potrebbero essere molti-
plicati per ogni decennio del secolo. Data questa tendenza, le crisi costanti
nell’amministrazione del debito pubblico erano prevedibili. Gia negli anni
Quaranta, non appena il sistema del Monte delle doti si stava avviando, si
manifestarono le prime difficoltà nel redimere doti maturate, e il governo si
vide costretto a pagare questi obblighi ratealmente.!° Con il passare del
tempo, mentre il numero delle doti maturate aumentava, si accrebbero i
problemi che l’amministrazione del Monte dovette affrontare. Pur avendo
diminuito l'ammontare totale che il Monte doveva pagare ogni anno, la
riforma del 1442 non aveva radicalmente alterato il compito principale del
Monte, cioè il pagamento di somme cospicue (per le doti maturate) che non
erano facilmente sopportate dalle finanze comunali. L'entità totale di que-
sti obblighi e la tendenza a utilizzare sistematicamente i fondi del Monte
per supplire ai bisogni comunali contribuirono alla persistenza di una crisi
fiscale quasi ininterrotta nella seconda metà del secolo.
Tre documenti ci consentono di intravedere le dimensioni del problema,
come anche la consapevolezza nutrita da contemporanei della gravità di
questa situazione. Due scrivani del Monte, indipendentemente l’uno dal-
l’altro, prepararono dei calcoli sulle responsabilità assunte dal Monte delle
doti. Secondo il primo calcolo, soltanto per i depositi fatti entro il 1451 il
Monte delle doti avrebbe dovuto in effetti sborsare una somma in eccesso
di 1.200.000 fiorini. E il secondo scrivano fece un calcolo simile per depo-
siti effettuati prima del 1465, i quali nel quindicennio successivo avrebbero
comportato una spesa di 2.600.000 fiorini.!’ Un terzo personaggio, Ala-
manno de’ Medici, nel 1467 preparò una scritta dello stato del Monte.
Secondo i suoi calcoli, il Monte godeva di un introito di 232.650 fiorini. In
più, per il 1467 poteva ricevere una somma supplementare di 54.000 fiori-
ni, proveniente da varie imposte recentemente approvate. Eppure, le spese
annuali del Monte ammontavano a 317.067 fiorini, dei quali 107.039 fiori-
ni per le paghe ai creditori del Monte comune e 174.204 fiorini per pagare
l’interesse del credito dozium puellarum maritandarum. In più, il Monte
aveva debiti in eccesso di 300.000 fiorini, in larga misura per paghe del
14 Balie 27, ff, 1r-3v, 77v, 119v-122r.

15 NA, D 65, no. 63, f. 16r.
16 Per uno dei molti esempi, vedere Monte Comune 1350, f. Ir.
7 La prima cifra, precisamente di 1.245.591 fiorini, si trova in Monte Comune 1391. Il
secondo calcolo, precisamente di 2.638.785 fiorini, si trova in Carte del Corredo 24, f. 33v.
Monte e per doti maturate che non erano state pagate nel passato. Inoltre,
Alamanno dei Medici calcolò che il valore delle doti maturate nel 1467
sarebbe ammontato a quasi 300.000 fiorini.'®
Ecco perché neppure l’erezione del Monte delle doti, un istituto la cui
amministrazione avrebbe dovuto alleggerire il peso fiscale del governo,
approdò ad una attenuazione della crisi fiscale fiorentina. Gli obblighi
assunti dal Monte erano di tale entità da non concedere al governo la pos-
sibilità di affrontare senza problemi le sue responsabilità.
Nel 1442 si era sperato che la decisione di abbinare il Monte delle doti
al Monte comune avrebbe avuto come risultato il superamento della crisi
fiscale. Ben presto, però, il problema si ripropose, essendo il governo chia-
mato a redimere le doti già maturate. Dalla metà degli anni Cinquanta fino
al 1478 l'ufficio del Monte dovette affrontare questo problema, che non
riuscì a risolvere in modo soddisfacente. Dopo aver cercato di superare il
problema inventando vari espedienti, come di dilazionare i pagamenti di
doti maturate, oppure di pagare certe doti in contanti e altre in crediti del
Monte, oppure di costringere mariti ad aspettare per periodi che si allun-
gavano anche per anni prima di essere pagati, il governo decise di risolvere
il problema trasformando radicalmente l'istituzione del Monte delle doti.!
Dal 1478 in poi, il Comune s’impegnò a restituire non tutto il valore delle
doti maturate ma piuttosto di pagare in contanti soltanto una parte di esse
— all’inizio la quinta, poi la quarta e dopo il 1503 la terza. La parte della
dote non pagata in contanti veniva registrata in Monti appositamente crea-
ti, il Monte de’ 7, 4, 3 per cento.?° Il risparmio effettuatovi a breve scaden-
za era notevole. Se, per esempio, esaminiamo le vicende del Monte nel
periodo marzo 1480/1 — febbraio 1481/2 troviamo che 113.000 fiorini furo-
no iscritti al Monte de’ 7 per cento, una somma che prima della riforma del
1478 sarebbe stata pagata in contanti dal governo ai suoi creditori. Le
somme registrate in questi Monti speciali si aggirarono su questa grandez-
za per tutto il resto del secolo.?!
E in questo contesto che si dovrebbe accennare ad un’altra tattica ado-
perata dal governo per controllare l’entità delle sue spese per il Monte delle
8 I calcoli di Alamanno dei Medici si trovano in una miscellanea di documenti fiorenti-

ni nella University of Pennsylvania Library (Philadelphia, U.S.A.), Lea Manuscript 461, ff.
16-17.
‘ In un lavoro ormai in preparazione ci proponiamo di presentare un’esposizione det-
tagliata della storia del Monte in questi anni.
La legislazione sull’erezione del Monte de’ sette per cento si trova in PR, 169, f. 84v.
Sui Monti del tre e del quattro per cento Consiglio dei Cento 3, parte 2a, ff. 72r-73r. Il testo
di questa legge fu edito da Kirshner (1978), 68-71.
2! Monte Comune 1132, ff. 56v-94v.
6. LAMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO ei
doti. Cominciando con gli anni Sessanta, il governo decretò che la gabella
dovuta sull’intera dote ricevuta dal marito al momento del matrimonio —
cioè, non solo sulla porzione dotale ricevuta dal Monte — doveva essere
detratta direttamente dalla dote del Monte. Se, per esempio, un giovane
riceveva una dote di 1.200 fiorini, 960 dei quali gli venivano pagati dal
Monte ed il resto dalla famiglia di sua moglie, la gabella dovuta sulla somma
di 1.200 fiorini veniva direttamente detratta dai 960 fiorini prima che egli
fosse pagato dal Monte. Dopo il 1478, questa detrazione venne fatta dalla
porzione della dote che doveva essere versata in contanti dal Monte. Così,
per esempio, nel 1486 la somma globale di doti maturate superava di poco
i 114.000 fiorini. Tre quarti di questa somma vennero iscritti sul Monte de’
7 per cento; dal resto, vennero, detratti 4.706 fiorini per varie gabelle, e sol-
tanto 23.842 fiorini furono sborsati in contanti. Così, invece di pagare più
di 114.000 fiorini ai beneficiari di depositi dotali, il Monte potè pagare
meno del 21 per cento della somma loro dovuta.”
Finora abbiamo esaminato i sistemi adoperati dal governo per effettua-
re la stabilizzazione del debito pubblico. Labbinamento del Monte delle
doti al Monte Comune, l’uso dei crediti di Monte per effettuare i depositi
dotali, e finalmente l’erezione dei tre Monti speciali ebbero come effetto
cumulativo la stabilizzazione del debito pubblico. Queste misure avevano
ottenuto un certo successo a breve scadenza. Il problema strutturale, però,
non venne risolto da questa tattica. Tutte le strategie finora esaminate con-
sentivano al governo di spostare ad un momento futuro, le sue responsabi-
lità verso i creditori, sia quelli del Monte Comune sia la massa dei benefi-
ciari del Monte delle doti. Nella seconda parte di questa esposizione accen-
neremo brevemente al tentativo governativo di ritirare dalla circolazione
una parte cospicua del debito consolidato. Questa manovra fu fatta con una
politica cauta e circoscritta, il cui scopo fu quello di monetizzare una por-
zione del debito pubblico.
Già prima del 1460 si intravede occasionalmente il desiderio del gover-
no fiorentino di costringere i suoi cittadini a pagare i vari oneri fiscali non
in contanti ma in crediti del Monte Comune, oppure in paghe dovute per i
loro crediti.?? Questa politica venne applicata con sistematicità a comincia-
re dagli anni Sessanta. Dopo quel periodo, ogni volta che il governo impo-
22 Monte Comune 1134 ff. 72r, 84r. Una situazione simile emerge nell’anno 1495, quan-
do 61.872 fiorini furono iscritti nel Monte de’ tre per cento, e la somma di 3.425 fiorini fu
poi detratta dalla parte delle doti dovuta ai creditori in contanti. Monte Comune 1135, ff.
20r, 30v. I
2 Per esempi di questa pratica prima del 1460, cfr. Monte Comune 1116, f.1r (marzo
1437/8), Monte Comune 1270; f. 2v (marzo 1438/1439), PR, 134, ff. 142r-145r (ottobre
1443), 140, ff. 280r-v (febbraio 1449/1450).
neva un onere precisava se il contribuente aveva l’opzione (oppure se fosse

costretto) di versare il suo pagamento in crediti o in paghe del Monte. Cosi,
per esempio, nel 1465 fu deliberato che chiunque avesse dichiarato nel
Catasto del 1458 di possedere dei crediti del Monte avrebbe dovuto paga-
re certi oneri recentemente imposti utilizzando dei crediti di Monte.* Poco
dopo, a causa di certi dubbi sollevati da cittadini, i quali non erano certi se
potevano soddisfare i loro pagamenti al fisco con crediti altrui comperati in
piazza, il governo determinò che qualsiasi credito o paga, senza riguardo
alla sua proprietà originaria, avrebbe potuto essere usato per tale scopo.”
Infine il governo pubblicò delle liste di equivalenza tra oneri imposti e valo-
ri di vari tipi di crediti pubblici. Così, per esempio, in gennaio 1480/81 fu
dichiarato che 90 fiorini di crediti del Monte de’ 7 per cento equivalevano
a 100 fiorini di debiti fiscali.2°E nel 1505 una lista molto dettagliata fu pub-
blicata, la quale precisava il valore di 1 fiorino di debito fiscale in una
gamma di vari tipi di crediti: da 9 s. di crediti iscritti nel Monte de’ 7 per
cento a 2 fiorini 13 s. 4 d. di crediti di Monte.’
È difficile calcolare con precisione l’ammontare totale risparmiato dal
Comune con questa strategia. Qualche esempio potrebbe servire come
guida. Da settembre 1482 a novembre 1488 le prestanze furono distribuite
secondo il «dispiacente sgravato». 44 prestanze furono imposte secondo
questo metodo, 32 delle quali dovevano essere fatte in contanti e le 12 rima-
nenti in crediti o paghe del Monte.?8 Dal 1496 al 1499 circa il 15 per cento
di tutte le paghe sborsate a creditori del Monte de’ 7 per cento furono uti-
lizzate per pagare debiti di persone private al Comune.” Nel libro di ricor-
di dettagliatamente tenuto da Matteo Palmieri scopriamo che nel 1468 rice-
vette ca. 150 fiorini per gli interessi dovutigli per i suoi crediti del Monte
Comune. 98 fiorini di questa cifra gli furono versati in contanti, ed il resto
gli fu accreditato sul pagamento delle sue prestanze.? Finalmente, scopria-
mo nei libri di contabilità di Filippo di Matteo Strozzi che da aprile 1481 a
dicembre 1491 pagò circa il 40 per cento delle sue imposte non in contan-
ti ma in crediti o in paghe del Monte.?! Queste cifre non ci consentono di
2 PR, 156, ff. 104v-106r (agosto 1465).

© PR, 161, ff. 80v-81r (agosto 1470).
26 PR, 171, ff. 116v-118v (gennaio 1480/81).
27 PR, 196, ff. 1r-2r (aprile 1505).
28 Miscellanea Repubblicana 112, ff. 75r-v.
2 Monte delle Graticole 1173.
*” Acquisti e Doni 7, f. 70r.
| CS, ser. V, 36, ff. 93,193; 44, ff. 58,240; 51, f. 47. Questi riferimenti archivistici furono
segnalati da Goldthwaite (1980), p. 59. Il lettore deve essere avvertito che i calcoli del
Goldthwaite basati sui dati di questi documenti sono sbagliati.
calcolare in maniera precisa i risparmi effettuati nel finanziare il debito

pubblico. Il punto, comunque, sembra abbastanza chiaro. Basandosi su
questa politica — cioè consentendo la monetazione parziale del debito pub-
blico: una monetazione si dovrebbe sottolineare valida solo per il paga-
mento di oneri fiscali — il governo pervenne al risultato di ritirare dalla cir-
colazione una porzione cospicua del debito pubblico fiorentino.
Durante periodi di pace relativa; quando il governo poteva permettersi
qualche spesa in più, spesso imponeva ai beneficiari del Monte delle doti di
liquidare — cioè di vendere allo stato — una parte dei loro crediti di Monte
comune. Specialmente agli inizi degli anni Novanta, si prese la decisione che
ogni marito ricevente una dote dal Monte (oppure ogni padre depositante
per una dote) doveva liquidare 180 fiorini di crediti del Monte comune per
ogni 100 fiorini di dote maturata (o da maturare), ad un prezzo non ecce-
dente il 10 percento del valore nominale dei crediti del Monte.” In tal modo,
offrendo un prezzo più basso di quello che non vigeva in piazza, e impo-
nendo ai mariti questa liquidazione come condizione per il pagamento della
loro porzione dotale, gli ufficiali del Monte riuscirono a ritirare dalla circo-
lazione un’ammontare addizionale del debito pubblico consolidato.
Finora abbiamo concentrato la nostra attenzione sulla dimensione tec-
nica, di carattere prevalentemente fiscale, nella gestione del debito pubbli-
co fiorentino. Ovviamente, i problemi esaminati ci propongono anche delle
domande di una portata più vasta, domande che incidono sugli svolgimen-
ti della vita politica e sociale a Firenze. Come conclusione di questa rela-
zione vorrei accennare a questi problemi non tanto perché la loro risolu-
zione mi sembri ovvia, ma perché è possibile che la loro presentazione
possa offrirci dei punti di discussione e di ulteriore elaborazione.
Cominciamo con una domanda già posta nell’esposizione precedente.
Come spiegare l’interesse dei cittadini fiorentini di investire i loro fondi nel
Monte delle doti? Teoricarnente, dal punto di vista strettamente economi-
co, la conversione dei crediti del Monte comune in depositi sul Monte delle
doti non avrebbe dovuto essere un’operazione molto vantaggiosa: come già
notato, per tutto il quindicesimo secolo, gli interessi promessi ai detentori
di crediti del Monte comune erano più elevati dei tassi d’interesse promes-
si ai depositanti nel Monte delle doti. Eppure, migliaia di cittadini fiorenti-
ni sembrano non aver esitato prima di convertire i loro crediti in depositi
dotali. Come spiegare questo fenomeno? I dati a nostra disposizione non ci
consentono la possibilità di rispondere inequivocabilmente a questa
domanda. Ciò che segue è una risposta ipotetica, non convalidata, pur-
troppo, da una documentazione convincente.
32 Balie, 39, ff. 471-49v (7 giugno 1491); PR, 182, f. 50r (20 novembre 1491).
Innanzitutto, si dovrebbe notare che in pratica i creditori del Monte

comune non sempre ricevevano gli interessi dovuti loro dal governo pun-
tualmente e in pieno. Ripetutamente, durante tutto l’arco del quindicesimo
secolo si constata la tendenza degli amministratori del Monte a trattenere le
paghe dovute ai creditori del Monte comune. E difficile fare dei calcoli pre-
cisi e sistematici per computare gli interessi reali percepiti dai creditori del
Monte comune. Comunque, gli atti legislativi, come anche i libri di contabi-
lità del Monte contengono numerosi riferimenti sia a decisioni di trattenere
una parte delle paghe del Monte, che alle cifre globali trattenute. Certo, que-
sta usanza si constata anche nell’amministrazione del creditum puellarum
maritandarum. E anche per questo motivo, come si è già visto, che il Monte
ebbe dei grossi problemi nel restituire le doti maturate. Tuttavia, la gestione
della politica fiscale sembra aver privilegiato i depositi dotali e averli favori-
ti rispetto ai crediti del Monte comune. In una legge del 1456, per esempio,
si legge che gli interessi ai creditori del Monte comune non erano stati paga-
ti per due anni, per cui era emersa «gran confusione, per lo debito et disor-
dine del Monte». Negli anni 1457-1459 il governo pagò soltanto un terzo
delle paghe dei crediti del Monte comune, mentre negli stessi anni gli inte-
ressi dovuti sul credito dotale venivano pagati in pieno.** Questi esempi
potrebbero essere facilmente moltiplicati sia per gli anni anteriori che per
quelli posteriori agli anni Cinquanta. Sembrerebbe, cioè, che in pratica i cre-
diti del Monte comune non producevano una rendita consistente per i loro
detentori. Se, effettivamente, la situazione era come ho suggerito qui, ci
sarebbe stato un motivo di più per indurre i cittadini fiorentini a convertire
i loro crediti del Monte comune in depositi dotali. Questi cittadini gradual-
mente accumulavano crediti del Monte mentre pagavano le prestanze impo-
ste loro dal governo. Durante una parte del quattordicesimo secolo, come
Roberto Barducci ha dimostrato in un suo recente articolo, il governo potè
restituire ai suoi creditori i loro capitali. Nel secolo seguente, a causa delle
gravi crisi fiscali che investirono Firenze, questi capitali — almeno per le pre-
stanze normali — vennero congelati dal governo, il quale saltuariamente
sborsava gli interessi dovuti ai suoi creditori. Il mercato di questi crediti
rimase molto attivo; gli speculatori potevano approfittare dei prezzi piutto-
sto modici di questi crediti per trarre guadagni cospicui. Per la maggioranza
dei cittadini, però, i capitali investiti nel loro governo erano essenzialmente
perduti. Si potrebbe supporre — senza però avere nessuna convalida docu-
mentaria su questo punto — che la propensione dei cittadini fiorentini a con-
> PR, 147, f. 152r, 22 dicembre 1456.

4 Monte Comune 1399.
© Già citato sopra in nota 2.
vertire i loro crediti in depositi dotali era basata su di un loro desiderio di

recuperare, tramite le doti maturate, i loro investimenti originari nel Monte
comune. E soltanto tramite ricerche molto più dettagliate che si potrà con-
validare, oppure modificare, le ipotesi qui proposte.
L'amministrazione del debito pubblico fiorentino potrebbe consentirci

di intravedere certe tendenze di massima nella vita politica di Firenze nel
quindicesimo secolo.
La tendenza a personalizzare le vicende politiche di una città come
Firenze — di intravedere nello svolgimento della sua storia prevalentemen-
te iniziative di individui particolari — ha avuto la sua influenza anche sulla
storiografia fiscale. Esiste un’interpretazione condivisa da commentatori e
storici - da Alamanno Rinuccini e Piero Parenti a Louis Marks — di asse-
gnare responsabilità primaria per i problemi del Monte a Lorenzo ed ai suoi
amici.*° Almeno per quel che riguarda la gestione fiscale, io suggerirei che
questa visione sia nello stesso tempo troppo drammatica e troppo semplici-
stica. Tutti i dati a nostra disposizione indicano che i problemi del Monte
non erano creati dalla sua amministrazione inefficiente né necessariamente,
da ingerenze di Lorenzo. È ovvio che Lorenzo cercò di utilizzare i fondi del
Monte per i suoi scopi diplomatici e militari. Altrettanto ovvio è il fatto che
questo tipo di interferenza era già stato effettuato, decenni prima di Loren-
zo da tutti quelli che gestivano la vita politica fiorentina. Ormai da genera-
zioni prima della seconda metà del Quattrocento si constata la tentazione
di alti magistrati fiorentini di vedere nei fondi del Monte una riserva di
denaro liquido da usare a loro comodo per scopi che non avevano niente a
che fare con la gestione del debito pubblico. Nella mia presentazione di
oggi ho cercato di suggerire che i problemi del Monte avevano fondamen-
to nella sua struttura, la quale era ben radicata nelle tradizioni storiche fio-
rentine. Innanzitutto, si constata l’insistenza della classe dirigente fiorenti-
na a utilizzare introiti pubblici come fonte di profitto privato e di rifiutare
sistematicamente di sottoporsi ad un regime fiscale basato sulla tassazione
diretta. La creazione del Monte delle doti, come anche tutta la gestione del-
l'apparato fiscale crearono problemi complessi, e di non facile soluzione, i
quali, puntualmente si manifestarono nella seconda metà del secolo.
Se da una parte una lezione che potrebbe essere ricavata dallo studio
36 Per Parenti, BNF, Fondo Nazionale II, IV, 169, f. 128v. Dopo aver elencato le occa-
sioni nelle quali Lorenzo e Piero de’ Medici avevano defraudato il Monte, Parenti conclude:
«Mai cittadini nella nostra terra si trovarono e quali tanto disonestamente et in tanta somma
e danari del comune si usurpassino». Per Rinuccini: Rinuccini (1840), CXL VII. Per il giu-
dizio più sfumato di L. Marks vedere il suo saggio Marks (1960), 145-146.
della fiscalità fiorentina riguarda la necessità di cercare nella storia di Firen-

ze non tanto iniziative individuali, ma piuttosto strutture e tendenze a lungo
termine, dall’altra parte la storia del Monte fiorentino nel Quattrocento ci
illustra la tendenza di certi organi governativi ad espandere il loro potere ed
effettuare una certa centralizzazione amministrativa. Non credo che sia
necessario basarsi su termini come burocratizzazione (adatti a descrivere
fenomeni storici ben più recenti) per cogliere quella tendenza centralizza-
trice evidente nella storia fiscale di Firenze. Comunque risolviamo il pro-
blema terminologico, rimane il fatto che, sotto il peso delle responsabilità
della gestione del Monte, questa magistratura, durante il corso del XV seco-
lo, manifestò la tendenza ad appropriarsi di gran parte della gestione fisca-
le del Comune. Entro la fine degli anni Quaranta, il Monte gestiva diretta-
mente la gabella delle porte come quella del vino al minuto, e sorvegliava
anche l’incasso di tasse imposte sul contado e sulle città soggette.” Nel
1452, a queste resporisabilità fu aggiunta quella della gestione della gabella
del sale. Sotto il peso degli obblighi imposti al Monte, gli ufficiali ad esso
preposti avevano creato un organismo di importanza capitale nella vita eco-
nomica e politica della loro citta.** Non c’era nessuna spesa pubblica — dal
finanziamento dello Studio a quello delle galere — che non venisse gestita e
spesso anche direttamente controllata dagli ufficiali del Monte. Ora a me
sembra che quegli storici, i quali vorrebbero esaminare il processo secondo
il quale proprio verso il cadere del medioevo si concretizzò una tendenza
verso la centralizzazione delle magistrature governative, dovrebbero con-
centrare la loro attenzione sulla politica fiscale dei comuni come quello fio-
rentino. Nel caso di Firenze, la tendenza centralizzatrice che si intravede
nella storia del Monte incise in modo molto diretto e profondo su tutti i
livelli di vita fiorentina. Molto più di quanto non era il caso nelle vicende di
cancellerie, o di strutture diplomatiche, mi sembra che fu proprio la gestio-
ne fiscale ad essere principalmente responsabile dell’emergere di un tipo di
governo basato su strutture governative centralizzate.
Da questo punto passerei ad un’altra serie di osservazioni. Negli ultimi

anni è stata ripresentata come nuova un’interpretazione abbastanza vecchia
delle vicende economiche e fiscali di Firenze. Secondo questa interpreta-
zione, formulata da Richard Goldthwaite e da membri della sua scuola,°?
a PR e136), 1701; 198 sth, 1340195"

28: Balter 27,4, 34:
* Goldthwaite ha presentato questa tesi nel suo libro, già menzionato alla nota 26. La
sua allieva, Judith Brown, ha applicato la tesi del suo maestro sul territorio e distretto in
BrownJ. (1982).
Firenze godette di un’economia dinamica ed espansiva durante tutto il

quindicesimo secolo. Sorvolando sui dati statistici presentati dallo Herlihy
e dalla Klapisch, Goldthwaite ha cercato di presentare l’immagine di una
società nella quale prevaleva l’opportunità economica, dove si constatava
una circolazione impressionante della ricchezza, dove era sempre possibile
formare dei patrimoni nuovi, e dove lo stato imponeva ben pochi oneri ai
suoi abitanti. Questa, certamente, non è la sede adatta per discutere tale
tesi. Basti dire che questa visione della società fiorentina non è sostenuta da
un esame della gestione del debito pubblico. E vero che le operazioni esa-
minate brevemente in questa relazione — essendo riuscite a contenere la
crescita del debito pubblico, ed anche avendo consentito al governo di riti-
rare una parte di questo debito — ebbero come risultato di attenuare la
domanda imposta dal governo ai suoi cittadini di prestiti forzosi. In questo
senso, la classe cittadina ebbe la possibilità di mantenere per i propri scopi
una parte crescente dei patrimoni privati, invece di essere costretta ad avan-
zare prestiti forzosi allo stato. Se è vero, cioè, che una parte crescente di ric-
chezza privata veniva liberata nella seconda metà del Quattrocento per
essere utilizzata a scopi privati, è altrettanto vero che questa generalizzazio-
ne può essere applicata principalmente (forse esclusivamente) alla classe
cittadina e creditizia. Un fatto da tener presente è anche che se la politica
del governo di Firenze riuscì parzialmente a contenere le sue spese, verso il
cadere del secolo il finanziamento del debito pubblico era tale da richiede-
re una spesa cospicua. Anche se le cifre necessarie fossero scese sotto i cen-
tomila fiorini annui, questa somma di liquido doveva essere trovata da qual-
che parte. Ora, è abbastanza chiaro che il debito venne sistematicamente
finanziato dagli introiti delle gabelle e dell’estimo, oneri, cioè, che pesava-
no molto più evidentemente su quei ceti del dominio fiorentino i cui mem-
bri rimanevano esclusi sia dalle magistrature fiorentine sia dalla possibilità
di usufruire di rendite che il governo metteva a disposizione dei suoi citta-
dini. Ripetutamente, nella seconda metà del secolo le tariffe di varie gabel-
le furono alzate per far fronte alle spese del Monte. E la coniazione delle
cosiddette monete bianche, le quali, effettivamente, aumentarono le tariffe
di tutte le gabelle del 25 per cento, produsse, secondo testimoni contem-
poranei come il Parenti, una grande animosità da parte del «popolo minu-
to» e della «plebe» contro la classe dirigente fiorentina.* Vale la pena sot-
40 La legislazione sull’uso della «moneta bianca» si trova in Miscellanea Repubblicana

108 (vol. III de’ 17), ff. 1r-4v (agosto 1490). Secondo la decisione del Consiglio de’ 17 Rifor-
matori, l’uso delle monete bianche fu introdotto in maggio 1491, cfr. Balîe, 39, ff. 37v-38r
(28 febbraio 1490/1) e ff. 38v-44r (23 marzo 1490/1). Queste stesse decisioni furono anche
registrate in Consiglio dei Cento 3, ff. 69r-v, 69v-73v. Il commento di Parenti si trova nel
tolineare il fatto che molte di queste riforme delle gabelle avevano esplici-
tamente avuto origine allo scopo di aumentare gli introiti del Monte.” Que-
sto rapporto asimmetrico tra classe dirigente e classi subalterne nel domi-
nio fiorentino — talmente chiaro nella documentazione contemporanea
eppure insistentemente negato da certi storici — è pienamente evidente
nella politica fiscale, e più precisamente nell’amministrazione del debito
pubblico fiorentino.
La nostra indagine ci propone un altro problema importante. Durante

tutto il XV secolo il mercato fiorentino fu letteralmente inondato da credi-
ti del Monte emessi sia dal Monte comune sia, dopo il 1478, dal Monte delle
doti. Qual è stato l’effetto sull'economia fiorentina della presenza di una
massa imponente di questi crediti, regolarmente scontati da speculatori sul
mercato? La documentazione a nostra disposizione illustra il fatto che i cre-
diti venivano usati come mezzo di pagamento per un'infinità di scopi. I cit-
tadini li usavano per pagare i propri debiti ad altri privati; per pagare l’ac-
quisto di terreni o di case; oppure per dotare le loro figlie. Inoltre, esisteva
una domanda costante di questi crediti perché, come già visto, venissero
usati per fare dei depositi al Monte delle doti, oppure per pagare gli oneri
imposti dal Comune. Infine, molto spesso i cittadini ricorrevano a questi
crediti come il «sodamento» o la «sicurtà» di una dote o di un debito. Nel
mercato venivano contrattati non solo i crediti stessi, ma anche le paghe che
stavano per essere guadagnate o che sarebbero state guadagnate nel futuro.
Insomma, quello che si constata — non solo a Firenze, ma anche in altri
grandi centri bancari come Venezia, Genova e Barcellona — è l’esistenza di
una massa monetaria non metallica di entità piuttosto notevole. Questa non
è la sede adatta per cercare di analizzare in che modo questa massa mone-
taria, che possiamo chiamare una moneta surrogata, incise sull'economia
fiorentina. Per dire la verità, in questo momento non è neppure chiaro
come misurare l’entità né la velocità di circolazione di questa moneta. Quel-
lo che si può fare ora è di constatare sia l’esistenza del fenomeno, sia la con-
manoscritto citato in nota 217, f. 16r. Vedere anche la sua osservazione, f. 84r, sotto la data
di novembre 1494, quando il governo abolì l’uso delle monete bianche. Nardi (1584), 22-
23, commenta che il «popolo» nutriva un «odio mortale» contro ser Giovanni Guidi, notaio
e cancelliere delle Riformagioni e Antonio di Bernardo Miniati «stato lungamente provedi-
tore del Monte... per esser costoro reputati sottili inventori delle molte et insoportabili
gabelle e gravezze poste alla città, conciosia cosa che la nuova moneta de’ quattrini bianchi
da loro consigliata, havesse fatto crescere la quarta parte più il pregio del sale e di tutte l’al-
tre gabelle».
*! Vedere come esempi Consiglio dei Cento 2, ff. 9r-12r (7 giugno 1477); Bale, 33, f. 7r
(luglio 1490).
6. AMMINISTRAZIONE DEL DEBITO PUBBLICO 129
sapevolezza da parte del governo della sua importanza. In varie pravvisioni

promulgate nel corso del secolo, i legislatori fiorentini cercarono di rimuo-
vere vari impedimenti al mercato di crediti. Così, per esempio, nel gennaio
1452/3, per dare uno stimolo alla vita commerciale della città, e per conce-
dere la possibilità ai mercanti di «permutare seu baractare < eorum > mer-
cantias cum denariis montis comunis» si decise di rimuovere certe restri-
zioni recentemente imposte sul traffico di crediti di Monte.* In una prov-
visione del 1478, poi rinnovata nel 1486, si legge che «per trarre fuori il
numerato da quegli che no lo girano in merchato» si decise di non imporre
la gabella delle permute sui contratti fatti «pe’ tempi», cioè permute di cre-
diti che non sarebbero stati validi prima di una certa data nel futuro.*
Finalmente, nel giugno 1491 si prese la decisione che la gabella delle per-
mute sarebbe stata imposta sul valore di mercato e non su quello nominale
di crediti venduti in piazza.¥4
Molti storici hanno notato l’importanza del Monte nella vita politica e
fiscale fiorentina nel XV segolo. Ormai è diventato più o meno di pramma-
tica, ogni volta che si fa riferimento al Monte, citare la provvisione famosa
del 1470 nella quale il Monte è descritto con una metafora biologica, come
il cuore della vita cittadina. Io preferirei aggiungere a queste citazioni il
riferimento ad un passo di Francesco Guicciardini. Nella sua opera poi inti-
tolata da Roberto Ridolfi Le Cose Frorentine, il grande storico, scrivendo
negli anni 1527-1528, ebbe occasione di riflettere sul peso straordinario
assunto dal Monte nella vita politica della sua città nel corso del secolo pre-
cedente. In una nota si riferì ad un detto comune tra i suoi concittadini: «O
il Monte disfarà Firenze, o Firenze disfarà il Monte».*° Nella mia relazione
ho cercato di elucidare quei meccanismi adoperati dai governatori fiorenti-
ni per disfare il Monte; per ridurre il suo peso, per contenere le spese che
l’amministrazione del debito pubblico imponeva sul governo fiorentino.
Ma abbiamo anche visto quanto fu impossibile il compito di disfare il
Monte, talmente si era insinuato nella vita quotidiana di Firenze. In fin dei
conti, come scrisse il cancelliere della Balìa del 1452 questo Monte «est pul-
42 Balie, 27, ff. 85v-86r.

4 PR, 169, ff. 56v-57r (19 agosto 1478); 177, ff. 132r-v (14 febbraio 1486/1487).
4 Balie, 39, ff. 47r-49v (7 giugno 1491).
4 PR, 161, f. 168r.
4 Guicciardini (1945), 109: «... si è facta questa soma del Monte che tiene affogata la
ciptà, in modo che, come già decto, o el Monte disfarà Firenze o Firenze disfarà el Monte.
Et se bene queste paghe si distribuischono tra’ cictadini, pure el beneficio non è pari al male,
bisognando per questo porre graveze che sono cosa violenta et sono causa di molti disordi-
ni, inimicitie et ruine di cictadini, né è giusto o utile cavare e’ danari di borsa agl’huomini
per pagare e’ debiti delle terze persone».
sus... nostre civitatis et... ex inde procedunt... ille aptitudines que dant
medium pro conservanda libertate huius populi». Senza necessariamente
applicare una definizione anacronistica alle espressioni «populus» e «liber-
tas» possiamo concludere col registrare il nostro accordo sull'importanza
enorme, e tuttora non bene intesa e studiata, del debito pubblico sulla vita
fiorentina.
o, Pa Sones,
da
LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND THE MONTE.
NOIE ONSOURGES:
(with Giovanni Ciappelli)
I. The issue of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s role in the administration of Flo-

rence’s fiscal affairs, more specifically of the public debt (Monte), has long
simmered in a historiographic back burner. The charge that he abused his
political authority to enrich himself at government expense and that, con-
versely, his ready access to government funds further enhanced his standing
as the city’s unofficial head was first leveled shortly after his death by sev-
eral commentators, chroniclers and historians. Alamanno Rinuccini and
Giovanni Cambi accused Lorenzo of having spent, respectively, 200,000, or
50,000 florins for purchasing the consent of ecclesiastical authorities for his
son Giovanni’s elevation to the position of Cardinal. For his part, Piero Pa-
renti set the sum abused by Lorenzo for this purpose to 100,000 florins, but
added that he had also used many thousands of florins of government funds
for private purposes.! There is also the somewhat later testimony of Iacopo
Nardi, member of the anti-Medicean pzagnone faction. He ascribed to
Lorenzo an ingenious if complex scheme for defrauding the government.
© This article is the outcome of a somewhat accidental collaboration, result of a conver-

sation in whose course we discovered that we shared a number of doubts about recent dis-
cussions on Lorenzo’s dealings with the fiscal authorities. Each of us had already presented,
very generally and hypothetically, his questions in other works: Ciappelli (1995a); Molho
(1994), 71n, 298n, and Molho (1996). Following this conversation, we decided to join our
efforts and to pursue this issue more systematically. Anthony Molho wishes to thank Alison
Brown for having graciously discussed — in writing and in a lengthy conversation — her arti-
cle on Lorenzo and the Monte. The authors have worked together both in writing this arti-
cle, and in doing all the necessary research. They share equal responsibility for it. For prac-
tical purposes only, parts are attributed as follows: Giovanni Ciappelli wrote sections II.3
and III and Appendix 2, Anthony Molho wrote sections I, II.1, II.2 and Appendix 1. All
unpublished documents to which reference is made below are found in the Archivio di Stato
di Firenze.
! These, as well as Machiavelli and Guicciardini’s charges, are cited in full by Conti
(1984), pp. 70-71.
Such charges were echoed, if only intermittently, by others over the follow-
ing several centuries.’
More recently, in the 1950s, Louis Marks, an English historian whose the-
sis on Florentine public finance in the latter decades of the fifteenth centu-
ry has regrettably remained unpublished, renewed interest in the issue by
discovering a document? which appeared to be a government audit of
Medici assets undertaken shortly after Lorenzo’s death. At last, it seemed
that Marks had come across clear, contemporary proof of Lorenzo’s high
handed, almost signorial behavior. Marks did not use the document himself,
but he brought it to the attention of Raymond de Roover, who, in his classic
treatment of the Medici bank, emphatically underscored what he took to be
Lorenzo’s abuse of power.4 De Roover thought that, among other things, the
document contained a government request, made in 1495, to Lorenzo’s heirs
that they reimburse the government 75,000 florins for a payment which, de
Roover thought, had been made to Lorenzo during his life without official
authorization. For de Roover, this document contained definitive proof that,
during his life, Lorenzo had abused public money for private purposes. A
decade later, Armando Sapori repeated the same point.’
Now, Alison Brown has once again raised the issue of Lorenzo’s dealings
with the Monte, and in a wide-ranging essay has inserted this question in
the context of a sustained discussion of Lorenzo’s «role and status in Flo-
rence».° Brown’s essay certainly merits the attention it has received in the
few years since its appearance, especially since she grounded her analysis in
a complex web of archival evidence much of it first discussed by her, and
in her enviable knowledge of Florence’s fifteenth-century political and
intellectual history. Her principal point — the cornerstone of her recon-
struction of Lorenzo’s status — is that, as a result of an extraordinary meas-
ure enacted in July 1482, until his death in 1492 Lorenzo was able to draw
«increasingly large sums of money from the Monte» by relying on a sub-
terfuge which was tailor-made to his financial needs. By spring 1492 when
he died, he had pocketed more than 50,000 florins of public funds, with
which to pursue his own, private ends. «The tax concessions awarded to
Lorenzo in 1482», writes Brown, «to the loss of public revenues, were
* Nardi (1842), I, 26-27; Capponi (1876), II, 146, 161; Armstrong (1896), p. 263; Per-
rens (1888), I, 516; Palmarocchi (1941), 38.
> CS, Ls., 10, ff. 1907-191.
* De Roover (1963), 533-534.
? Sapori (1973), 164, 171.
° Brown (1992), to be compared to the «revised» version in Brown (1992a), 151-211.
Unless indicated, subsequent references are to the original version in Lorenzo de’ Medici, cit.
7. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND THE MONTE 133
intended to save Lorenzo from bankruptcy and disqualification from polit-

ical office».” Two specific sets of documents led Brown to her arresting con-
clusion: a key enactment of the special committee (the Seventeen Reform-
ers, instituted a year earlier to oversee and coordinate Florence’ fiscal pol-
icy) of 22 July 1482, and the Monte’s master account-books, kept by the
agency’s cashier (camarlingo). The two — legislative enactment and the
ensuing movement of cash registered in account books — reinforced de
Roover’s nearly 40-years old reading of a document which postdated, if only
by a few years, Lorenzo’s death. Brown’s evidence, and the conclusions
which she vigorously drew from it seemed to settle the issue: Lorenzo
abused his political authority in order to pocket public moneys. In Brown’s
concluding reflection, «this account of Lorenzo’s dealings with the Monte
demonstrates [that] it was by means of communal institutions like the Sev-
enteen Reformers that Lorenzo was partially able to resolve one of the main
problems confronting him as unofficial head of state, that of funding.
Thanks to them Lorenzo was able “in reality and appearance” to lay the
basis for the «early-modern principate».*
In this note, we do not propose to address the complex questions dis-
cussed in Brown’s ambitious essay, and previously raised, if only by implica-
tion, by Marks and de Roover. The commingling of private and public inter-
ests in the exercise of political power in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Florence, a characteristic which, as is generally acknowledged, was greatly
intensified during Lorenzo’s life; the passage from communal to princely
forms of political organization, and the accompanying issue of the alleged
modernity of the late medieval (or renaissance) Florentine state; Lorenzo’s
own status, and his emergence as a tyrant — all these remain key questions
for students of Florentine history, but remain well beyond the scope of this
essay. Our aim is more modest: to review and assess the evidence on which
de Roover and Brown have based their striking conclusions. We shall pro-
ceed here by examining, in turn, each of the documents recently introduced
in the discussion: the audit discussed by de Roover; the enabling decree of
July 1482, which, it was suggested, opened the way for Lorenzo’s misappro-
priation of state funds; and the registration in the Monte’s account books of
the movements of funds from the state coffers to Lorenzo.
As we proceed with our own analysis, we shall show that this evidence
does not sustain the claims that historians have attached to it. In one case,
the document in question does point in the direction of the financial mis-
behavior of Lorenzo. But the Lorenzo in question is not the illustrious
7 Brown (1992), 131.

8 Brown (1992), 165.
member of the Medici family, but the more modest Lorenzo Tornabuoni,
partner of the Medici bank, and administrator of the Medici properties left
in Florence during the Medici exile. Furthermore, the events described in
this document postdate Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death and the fall of the
Medici regime in November 1494. In the second case, we show that a read-
ing of the enabling decree of 1482 granted Lorenzo de’ Medici fiscal privi-
leges very different in nature from those recently suggested, and that it
specifically forbade government officials from granting him the sort of
advantage which was claimed by Alison Brown. Finally, an examination of
the Monte account books shows that, indeed, for ten years preceding his
death, Lorenzo was registered as receiving payments from the Monte. The
apparent loss of a set of crucial fragments of Monte account books does not
permit us to know with exactitude the purpose for which these payments
were made. So, while the meaning we assign to the transactions analyzed by
Brown is tentative and subject to correction, we believe that the contents of
the decree of July 1482, and other circumstances we shall examine below
offer a different and more plausible explanation of these payments.
In the end, our contribution to this discussion is largely negative. To
show that documents cannot sustain a reading imputed to them is not to say
much about what Lorenzo de’ Medici might or might not have done, or,
more crucially, about his role and status in Florence. These are issues
which, quite correctly, have dominated Florentine historiography from the
time of the great early-sixteenth century historians, Machiavelli and Guic-
ciardini, to our day. All we wish to say here is that these important issues
will need to be addressed by making different — more cautious and mod-
est, or, if one will, more historically plausible — use than has heretofore
been done of the data we shall examine below.
II. The Medici flight from the city in November 1494 was followed by a
complex set of moves and countermoves to ensure that their creditors col-
lect what they claimed was owed them, and, conversely, that Medici prop-
erty interests be sheltered. The stakes in this political and legal battle were
great. In the preceding several decades, the Medici, thanks to the incom-
parable financial power conferred upon them by their bank, had not only
become entangled in financial transactions with private individuals, but had
become indispensable conduits for government and papal payments, of ten
advancing huge sums to foreign governments, or to mercenaries, and reim-
bursed, under a variety of terms, by the competent authorities at home.
? For example, in 1471 Edward IV was in debt with the London branch of the Medici
bank for 6,600 pounds, equivalent to more than 40,000 florins; this debt had been accumu-
Creditors, among whom important personages in the Papal and French

courts, feared that the Medici loss of power would result in the cancellation
of their debts.!° Florentine citizens, some of whom, to say the least, had
resented the ascendancy of the Medici and had good reasons to suspect that
government moneys had been used to advance Medici political interests,
sought to find ways to get back at the Medici, and eyed their properties in
the city as easy targets to settle political and other scores. The Medici them-
selves, relying of ten on the longa manus of their partisans and clients,
resorted to every possible expedient to shelter their goods, often, it seems,
hoping that their sometime banking partners who managed to avoid exile
would help shelter, through whatever means possible, portions of their
wealth.!! The document discovered by Marks and used by de Roover was
generated in the course of this battle of conflicting claims. lt does not
appear to be a government audit or request of money, but rather is the heat-
ed reflection of a man who presents a set of somewhat garbled figures, on
whose basis he urges the government to take stern action.
II.1. Written in 1500 (and not in 1495 as de Roover thought) by an

anonymous, but highly partisan anti-Medicean author, the document
addresses two issues, on each of which it makes essentially the same charge:
that a number of the government’ creditors should not have received inter-
est payments from the Monte, even if they were formally entitled to receive
these payments. At the core of his exposition, he places several transactions
with a bearing on the heirs of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s responsibilities toward
the Commune.
The first issue which emerges from this document (and from a small
number of other documents to which we compared its contents) is the fol-
lowing: on 14 November 1494 the Commune confiscated as rebel property
600 Ibs. worth of silver plate which belonged to Piero de’ Medici, and to his
brother, the cardinal. The government then used the plate as security to
borrow a total of 5,840 florins from three persons. Some months later, the
three creditors returned the silver to the Commune, while transferring their
lated during the first years of the War of the Roses. Amadeus IX, duke of Savoy, was in debt
with the Lyons branch for 4,824 florins, while the Apostolic Chamber’s debt with the Rome
branch of the Medici bank amounted to ca. 30,000 florins. De Roover (1963), 483-484, 527
(Sapori [1973], 191-192).
10 For example, in 1495 cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, future Pope Pius III, had a
credit of 9,321 florins, and the total indebtedness of the Medici bank’s Roman branch
amounted to 145,914 florins (Sapori [1973], 205).
11 See Agostino Cegia’s contemporary account in Pampaloni (1957). Giovanni Ciappelli
intends to study the history of the Medici patrimony following Piero” flight in 1494.
credit to others. Thus, although the silver plate was returned, the govern-
ment’s debt was not extinguished, and interest payments continued being
made to the new creditors. The charge with regard to this operation was
that, over the course of six years, the government had unnecessarily paid a
total of 5,000 florins of interest payments to these new creditors; the bor-
rowers, so continues the charge, should have kept the silver, pawned it
themselves, and not charged the government any interest at all.!°
But it is another operation which has direct bearing on this discussion,
because charges of mismanagement and of fraud against Lorenzo
(Tornabuoni) are directly mentioned in it. The author does not always
explain his reasoning clearly, and, certainly, he presupposes knowledge of
financial transactions and political decisions which he does not fully sum-
marize in his diatribe. Yet, on one crucial point, his meaning is unequivo-
cal. According to him, by 30 January 1494/95, i.e., more than two months
following Piero di Lorenzo” flight from Florence, the «heir of Lorenzo de’
Medici & Co. and their syndics and officials» (le rede di Lorenzo de’ Medici
e chompagni e lloro sindachi e huficiali) owed the government 62,700 fiori-
ni di grossi. This sum was arrived at by subtracting from an original and
higher debt the sum of 11,448 fiorini d’oro in oro and 650 fiorini di grossi,
which had been collected by the government on 14 November 1494. No
explanation is offered here about the origin of this debt, nor does the ref-
erence to a Monte account book — which we were able to track down —
clarify the issue. But the point is that an audit of account books in the
Camera del Comune (the government Exchequer) had shown that Lorenzo
Tomabuoni, who as partner of the Medici company was obligated to the
repayment of this debt, had also been the Communes creditor, as of 30
October 1495, for 10,000 fiorini larghi di grossi, on which he was entitled
to collect an annual interest payment of 14 percent. We know from extant
Monte documents that Tornabuoni had been a Monte official between
October 1495 and June 1496.! For a long time, but especially in the sec-
2 The full text of this document is published in Appendix 1, below. Compare the infor-
mation in this document with Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni in forza di ordinaria autorità,
97, ff. 28v (5 and 6 March 1494/95), 54v (19 May 1495), 71v (27 June 1495). The sources dif-
fer on a series of details, although they agree on subtantial points. The differences include the
dates of the operations, the fact that in the Deliberations of the Signori the name of Filippo
di Lorenzo Buondelmonti takes Selvaggia Strozzi’s place, the sum attached to Alfonso is
3,000 ducati rather than 3,400 florins, and the total weight of the silver plate is about 660 lbs.
5 Monte Comune, 1749, which is the libro 36° del Monte. Registrations of about 35,000
florini paid by the Signoria on behalf of the Medici are found on ff. 5467, 5877, 599 but no
explanation is offered for these payments.
# AT, 905, f. 5r There is some doubt about the date when Lorenzo Tornabuoni was
called to serve in the Monte. On 2 September 1494, his father Giovanni was drawn to office,
ond half of the fifteenth century, an important responsibility of Monte offi-

cials had been to advance loans to the government. In that capacity, Loren-
zo had loaned the government 10,000 florins, at an annual rate of interest
of 14 percent.! The anonymous author claimed that the Commune” cred-
itors could not demand the repayment of individual credits toward the gov-
ernment if they were contemporaneously the government’s debtors for
other purposes. And Tornabuoni, the accuser pointed out, as partner of the
old Medici bank, was responsible for the bank’s debts. Therefore, he
should have applied his 10,000 florin credit to the debt of the Medici com-
pany (di che dettif10m anno andare in esso chonto di sopra). But, in collu-
sion with the Monte officials, he turned the credit over to private citizens
and merchants, so that the annual interest rate of 14 percent continued
being paid by the government, to its «damage and prejudice» (7 progiudi-
cio, in danno del Chomune).'° Lorenzo Tornabuoni is not the only person
charged with malfeasance here. The Monte officials, who authorized the
use of this sum in a manner gonsidered improper, are also accused of act-
ing illegally (ché non dovevono e non potevono perché era obrighato al
Chomune per le chagione del debito di sopra). So, according to this author,
Lorenzo Tornabuoni and the Monte officials had overstepped their author-
ity, and instead of using the 10,000 florins to extinguish a portion of the
Medici syndics’s debt toward the commune, had used it for different, pre-
sumably Tornabuoni’ private purposes.
This reconstruction explains at once the involvement of the Monte offi-
cials in this transaction (for passages of ownership of such credits were reg-
istered in the Monte books and subject to their approval) and the reference
for a term to begin on 1 March 1494/95. But Giovanni resigned the position, and was
replaced, vigore legis by his son.
5 The data regarding Tornabuoni’s membership in the magistracy of the Monte comes
from Monte Comune, 1585, £. 563v (the 37° libro del camarlingo), and from Monte Comune,
1782, £. 776 left and right. In this register one finds references to short-term loans (not to be
confused with forced loans normally inscribed in the city’s funded public debt) for a total of
ca. 8,000 florins, at an annual rate of interest of 14 percent advanced by Lorenzo and Gio-
vanni di Bonaccorso Pitti, Niccolò and Salvi Borgherini, and messer Marco di Bartolomeo
de Paretes, a Catalan resident in Montpellier, while Lorenzo Tornabuoni was credited for an
additional 4,000 florins.
'6 It is worth pointing out that Lorenzo Tornabuoni was Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cousin,
and that he was given special responsibilities over Lorenzo de’ Medici’s estate. On 4 June
1495, Lorenzo Tornabuoni father, Giovanni (who for 30 years had administered the Roman
branch of the Medici bank) signed a special agreement with the administrators of the Medici
properties, according to which the Tornabuoni assumed responsibility for all debts and
credits of the Medici bank. The government agreed to pay the Tornabuoni 42,000 florins,
and they, in turn, promised to reimburse the Medici creditors (Sapori [1973] cit., 167).
to the payment of interest. Not only was the government defrauded by the
failure to credit the proper account with the 10,000 florins, but for five
years the Monte paid the full interest to the credit’s new owners, for a cost
to the government of 7,000 florins in cash. The accuser’s somewhat con-
fused exposition will need to be further sorted out when, eventually, a com-
prehensive reconstruction of the administration and disposition of Medici
properties is undertaken.!” But the point which is relevant to this discussion
is clear: the Lorenzo mentioned in this document is Lorenzo Tornabuoni
and not Lorenzo de’ Medici.'* The charge of malfeasance and violation of
authority leveled at the Monte officials does not refer to their actions pre-
ceding the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but rather to allegations of impro-
priety dating more than three years after Lorenzo’s death, in late October
1495. Thus, one must recognize that the document which set the tone for
much recent scholarly discussion about Lorenzo de’ Medici’s relations with
the Monte, and his abuse of authority is irrelevant to this issue.
II.2. The second document in our discussion is the decree passed in

secret session by the Seventeen Reformers on 22 July 1482.!° Four days ear-
lier, the Seventeen had decided to extend a general tax privilege to all citi-
zens.*° Before examining the decree regarding Lorenzo, a brief glance at the
earlier decision is necessary. As a result of the city’s recently difficult cir-
cumstances — the Pazzi conspiracy, the ensuing war against the Papacy,
and, more immediately, the war against Ferrara — fiscal pressure had
'7 According to the anonymous accuser’s charges, Lorenzo Tornabuoni (who was to be
beheaded in the court of the Bargello on 17 August 1497 following charges of conspiracy
intended to bring about the return of the Medici to the city) would have succeeded in shield-
ing the 10,000 florins against the claims of the Medici creditors. Furthermore, the 7,000
florins paid by the Commune as interest to various creditors should not have been dis-
bursed. Thus, the government would have lost («in danno e in progiudicio del Comune»)
17.000 florins. If one adds to that sum the ca. 6,000 inscribed to one citizen and the 5,000
florins of interest accrued over a period of five years, one reaches the sum of 28.000 florins:
«e i’ dicho che 1 Chomune è defrauldato grandemente in tutto della somma insino a oggi di
f. 28.000». According to the accuser’s argument, this sum should be added to the 62,700
florins for which the Medici remained the government’ debtors following the addition of
the 11,448 florini d’oro in oro and of the f. 650 di grossi. Thus, contrary to what de Roover
wrote, the document did not advance a request for the payment of 75,000 florins, but,
rather, it presented a claim that the Medici owed the goverment 62,700 florins; to this debt,
should be added the sum of28,000 florins, as a result of a combination of additional expens-
es and the loss of revenue.
!# De Roover’s claim in this regard was plainly wrong. De Roover (1973), 533.
' Published in Brown (1992), 144-147.
2 The decree is in Miscellanea Repubblicana 109, ff. 747-75v.
increased considerably. Starting in 1480 a range of fiscal measures was

approved: a variant of the catasto was introduced, based on the principle of
graduated assessment (scala), and the tax rolls were reformed. Notwith-
standing these innovations, complaints about the fiscal burden in the city
persisted. In an attempt to mute this situation,”! on 18 July 1482, the Sev-
enteen Reformers decided to allow contributors to pay a portion of their
assessments not in cash, but by turning over to the Monte a portion of the
interest (paghe) which the governrnent owed them for their Monte credits.
The principle of using future interest payments (and sometimes credits
themselves) in order to write off new taxes (or to pay off old tax debts) had
often been used in the past.?? For the government, the obvious advantage
of this policy was that it decreased, some time by substantial sums, the car-
rying charges of the public debt. For individual citizens, the gain was also
dear enough: they could avoid cash layouts when paying new taxes, even if,
in return, they had to forfeit interest payments which, in any case, they were
never certain would be paid promptly and in full. Many Florentines had
taken advantage of this possibility in the preceding several decades.
In the case of the decision taken on 18 July, two details set in their prop-
er context the concession granted four days later to Lorenzo. Paghe on
Monte credits used for such writing off of tax assessments had to be owned
by the tax contributor himself or by an individual listed (descritto) in his fis-
cal declaration, i.e., paghe could not have been acquired in the flourishing
secondary market from third parties.?? The reason for this restriction is evi-
dent. Market prices of both credits and of future interest payments fluctu-
ated, and, during those years, because of the government’ chronic inabili-
ty to disburse interest promptly, were being traded at values well below par:
credits themselves were quoted at ca. 10 percent of their face value, while
paghe ranged from 50 to 75 percent of par, depending on the deadlines of
anticipated payments, the funds in which they were inscribed, and, of
course, the public’s expectations about the government’ ability to pay.* An
individual who was allowed to write off his taxes at the nominal value of
credits (or paghe) purchased at substantial discount would have accrued a
21 The preamble of the long decree states that «considerato come nel paghare delle
gravezze e del balzello ultimamente posto sono pit infinghardi che non patiscono le loro
substanzie, et desiderando porre qualche stimolo che gli sproni al pagare, si provede in
questo modo...».
22 Molho (1994), ch. 2.
2 The paghe could be «così quelle di proprii crediti [...] come etiandio quelle che per
conditione o altra via o modo appartenessino ad alcuno de’ sopradetti».
A4 CS, V s., 36, f. 181 (May 1482: 12.6 percent); II s., 23, ff. 82 (March 1491: 10 percent),
112 (March 1496: 10 percent). See also Ciappelli (1997): 632, 640.
huge advantage over his compatriots who lacked resources to make com-
parable investments. Therefore, only interest payments owed for credits
registered in the tax payer’s name (or in the names of his dependents)
would be allowed as write-offs. Furthermore, the law went on to specify,
debtors of «old» tax bills could use the first two-thirds of their interest pay-
ments, all’un due, that is extinguishing one florin of debt with two florins
of paghe; if they were still in debt, they could use the remaining third to pay
all’un quattro, that is one florin of debt with four florins of paghe.
The concession granted to Lorenzo came on the heels of this decree,
and, for all its extraordinary nature, is not unconnected to the measure
enacted four days earlier, for it deals with the same issues. The only, if very
considerable difference is that now, for reasons amply explained in the
decree’s preamble (which was summarized in the text and published in the
appendix to her article by Alison Brown) the Seventeen Reformers thought
that a solution suitable ad personam to Lorenzo was necessary. Here, we
shall limit ourselves to discussing a small number of this document’s provi-
sions (without distinguishing points first made by Brown, and those intro-
duced by us in this discussion). The Seventeen Reformers were certainly
aware that the decision granting special privileges to Lorenzo de’ Medici
was unusual and controversial. The decree itself was not initially registered
among the Reformers’s deliberations, and even in the volume” official
index a blank space was left where the appropriate entry should have been
inserted. The reason for the secretiveness, as Alison Brown quite correctly
suggested, went to the heart of the type of regime which had emerged in the
city around Lorenzo’s figure. A very special concession was being granted
to one citizen, and while the concession itself was sign of that citizen’s spe-
cial status, acknowledgment of his primacy would certainly have resulted in
public resentment. The decree’s preamble is explicit. It pointedly refers to
the loss of reputatione — to Lorenzo himself and to the city’s stato which
depended on Lorenzo — if knowledge of his financial difficulties were to be
known publicly, as it assuredly would if the regular executive Councils (the
Signoria and the Colleges) were solicited for their approval.
The Medici, at least according to those who drafted this privilege, were
no longer able to sustain their traditionally huge fraction of the city’s tax
burden. The document presents a plausible explanation for the relative
economic straits in which the Medici found themselves in the early 1480s.
It says that four years earlier, Lorenzo had paid one-sixth more in gravezze
than he was supposed to; as a consequence he had expended (consumato)
most of his cash and his Monte credits. This alienation could hold an
2 Brown (1992), 146.

important key to this entire affair. In fact, cight months earlier, Lorenzo
redeemed with the Monte 73,171 florins of Monte credits, at a discount rate
of 13 and two-thirds percent, and used the cash equivalent of this transac-
tion (10,000 fiorini larghi, from which were deducted two gabelle normal-
ly assessed on such transactions) for the payment of his back taxes. About
four weeks later, on 23 December 1481, Lorenzo cashed in an additional
4,240 florins of his Monte credits, 4,000 for payment of certain properties
of the Parte Guelfa which he had recently acquired, and the balance for the
contract taxes owed on this purchase.?° In the interval between the two
transactions, he also turned over to the government a little more than 1,931
florins as partial payment of his taxes. Following these sales, Lorenzo’
own Monte holdings never amounted to more than 20,000 florins.? We can
then assume that the reference to the recent consummation of Lorenzo’
Monte credits was correct. Nothing about this transaction seems to be espe-
cially irregular or suspect. For her part, without any particular proof,
Brown suggests that Lorenzo’s contemporary critics may have had this
26 Cfr. Monte Comune, 3229 [libro del notaio e scriba delle permute, kept in latin], ff. 127r
(29 November 1481), 183v-184r (23 December 1481); Monte Comune, 1775 [lacks opening
folios, and ride, in volgare], f. 43v (23 November 1481).
27 Cfr. Monte Comune, 2490, f. 321r: «Ànone avuto a di 19 di diciembre 1481 f. mille
novecento trentuno, s. xj, d. iiij al Comune per le decime a libro rosso ac. [...] di licenza di
Lorenzo sopradetto per parte di sua parte, e per le X’ di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici».
28 Cfr. Monte Comune, 2490, f. 3215, where one reads: «Posti creditori detto Lorenzo e
Giuliano de’ Medici sopradetti al nuovo 7° S. Giovanni c. 754 di fior. 31.128, s. 18, d. 8».
Both in 1479 and 1480 (Monte Comune, 2596, £. 731; 1595, f. 113r [San Giovanni-Scrivano-
Creditori, 1479, 1480]) Lorenzo is listed as creditor for 63,169 florins; it is possible to esti-
mate his Monte credits in later years according to the following calculation:
63,169 (credits owned both in 1479 and 1480)
31,128 (credit of 1481, as a result of gravezze paid from February 1479 to May 1480).
94,297 (Total; from which deduct)
77,411 (73,171 +4,240)
16,886 (balance)
In the year 1482 (Monte Comune, 3015, f. 531r [San Giovanni-Scrivano-Creditori]),
Lorenzo, with his dead brother Giuliano, is listed as creditor for 16,887 florins. This figure
and the one based on our calculations are almost identical. For other 2486 florins Lorenzo
is listed as the only creditor (f. 5357).
In Monte comune, 2594, £. 111v (San Giovanni-Scrivano-Creditori, year 1485) Lorenzo is
credited along with Giuliano with an even smaller sum: 15,817 florins, to which are still
added 2486 florins (f. 104r) (See also Monte Comune, 2597, c. 102r [S. Giovanni-Scrivano-
Creditori, 1485-86]: 15,877 florins; f. 95v: 2486 florins). In 1492 (Monte Comune, 2452, f.
629), Lorenzo’s total credits were f. 57,783.10.6, result of credits transferred to his account
from the estates of his cousin Pierfrancesco (21,000 florins) and his mother (17,000 florins).
It seems clear, therefore, that in-the decade 1482-92, Lorenzo’s credits remained under the
sum of 20,000 florins.
transaction in mind when they accused Lorenzo of malfeasance. And, she

continues, there surely must have been something irregular about this
transaction, if Lorenzo was allowed to cash a large amount of Monte cred-
its, and other Monte creditors could only receive in cash small portions of
their interest.2? But this is an irrelevant point, for these two were very dif-
ferent (and were considered according to contemporary norms to have
been very different) types of operation.?° Because of financial exigencies,
portions of interest on Monte credits were often withheld by the Monte
officials, and, as we shall shortly see, Lorenzo was not exempt from this sort
of treatment. But the Monte officials were always anxious to have creditors
cash in their credits, especially when, as was the case with Lorenzo, the cash
value of the transaction was applied to the payment of a creditor’s back
taxes. Although we do not know the exact size of Florence’s funded debt in
the later decades of the fifteenth century, the credit redeemed by Lorenzo
may have amounted to as much as 2 to 3 percent of Florence’s total indebt-
edness. Even if the price offered Lorenzo was somewhat higher than the
then prevalent market prices for Monte credits, one need not make much
of this difference. Given the transaction’s enormous size, it is perhaps rea-
sonable to think that Lorenzo was allowed a premium of one or two per-
centage points.”
Another detail is more difficult to understand, and its importance seems
hard to assess on the basis of available evidence. The facts are these: Books
of permute, i.e., changes in ownership of Monte credits, were kept both by
2 Brown (1992), 131, and note 78.

* A crucial reading error may, indeed, have led Brown to her initial interpretation. In the
passage referred to in the preceding note, she mistakenly read florins instead of lire. Thus,
the respectable, but not immense sum of ca. 10,000 florins (55,000 lire) became 55,000
florins. In Brown (1992a) she corrected this error, but did not change any of the remaining
argument.
>! Monte Comune, 2490, provides valuable information with which to compute Loren-
zo’s tax payments. It appears from this information that in 1479 Lorenzo paid ca. 7,200
florins, in 1480 1,900 florins, for which he was credited with a total of 7,600 florins of Monte
credits; in 1481 he paid in two installments: 317 florins in February and on 31 December
about 265 florins for which he turned over ca. 1,931 florins of Monte credits. Thus, while in
1479 he paid 7,200 florins, in the two years following he only paid a total of ca. 2,200 florins,
or about 12,200 florins less than he would have paid had his assessment not changed since
1479. The data we present above in note 28 strongly suggest that in the years following 1480
he did not pay any taxes with which to be credited with additional Monte credits. Thus, by
November 1481 it is altogether possible that Lorenzo may have faced the task of having to
settle (to reach a composizione for) his unpaid (or only partially paid) back taxes. For a com-
parable example of the alienation of Monte credits to settle fiscal debts see Ciappelli (1995),
140, note 14, and 142, note 22.
the Monte” notary (in Latin) and the chancellor (in vernacular), and prob-
ably the notary’s book was a transcription and Latin translation of the trans-
actions first recorded in the Chancellor’s book. It was customary that such
transcriptions be made within a few days of the transactions. Yet, in Loren-
zo’s and another creditor’s cases, the sales were not recorded until several
weeks later. This tardiness triggered Alison Brown’s suspicion. What were
the Monte scribes trying to conceal from public view? And why?
The answer might be quite banal. A certain amount of confusion had pre-
vailed in the Monte office between December 1481, when the scribe, ser
Domenico di ser Santi, was first taken ill and then died, and 2 January
1481/82 when his replacement, ser Zanobi di Iacopo Bongianni, was
appointed. Immediately after the appointment of the new scribe, the 17
Reformers ordered him to reexamine the register, and enter in the notary’s
register any transactions omitted during the recent period of confusion. The
new notary compared the two registers and found that, in addition to some
entries beginning on December 20th (the dying notary’s last days) there were
three transactions contained in the Chancellor’s book which had not been
properly registered by his predecessor: the first, and by far the largest,
regarded Lorenzo, while the other two much smaller ones, for 899 and 1087
florins, were in the name of Antonio di Puccio Pucci and his daughter.’ The
scribe then proceeded to squeeze their registration in the notary’s register
under the proper dates. There might be several reasons for this tardiness.
One might be the dying scribe’s apparent negligence of his duties. Or else,
but perhaps less probably, a sense of embarrassment among Lorenzo’s
friends and followers led to the partial concealment of this transaction. After
all, Lorenzo’ s reputazione would not have been enhanced by the knowledge
that he and one of his most important allies in the regime, Antonio Pucci,
were obliged to sell their Monte credits in order to pay their taxes. Finally, a
marginal note next to these transactions might offer the necessary (but to us
still indecipherable) clue: these credits, says this marginal addition, were pro
Montibus penalibus, that is, the Monte officials were obligated, under penal-
ty, to assign these funds to the diminution of the Monte. This oversight in
registration might be a significant detail, or it might be no more than a /ap-
sus, of the sort that are legion in comparable books. It is difficult to tell why
the dying notary had not copied these entries in his book, while the new one
added them very soon after taking over his office.
32 Cfr. Monte Comune, 3229, f. 128r, 3 December 1481 (payments to «Alexandra domine
Piere domine Alexandre, de licentia Antonii Pucci de Puccis patris», and «Antonius domine
Nanne domine Ginevre, de licentia Antonii Pucci de Puccis, qui est supradictus Antonius»);
Monte Comune, 1775, £. 44r.
Whether it is because of the circumstances described in the preceding

two paragraphs, or, as the decree of 1482 has it, for «other good reasons»
(altri buoni rispetti), it was thought appropriate to offer Lorenzo some spe-
cial assistance. It would be good to know more precisely these «other
good reasons». One could speculate that they included a variety of circum-
stances: the possibility that the Medici wealth had shrunk since the centu-
ry’s central decades; that the property division between Cosimo’ and his
brother Lorenzo” heirs had greatly diminished the resources directly under
Lorenzo control; or, as de Roover suggested, that increasing fractions of
the Medici wealth may have been invested in unproductive ventures; or,
quite simply, that Lorenzo wished to have his tax burden reduced. Any one
of these reasons (or, more likely, a combination of them) may have had a
bearing on the decision to grant him a special privilege. Curiously, for all
the recent proliferation of studies on Lorenzo, occasioned by the fifth cen-
tenary of his death, answers to these seemingly basic questions on his eco-
nomic fortunes are difficult to locate in the literature.
It is possible that the decree’s preamble contains a sufficient amount of
information with which to answer these questions. The decree simply states
that given the enormous size of Lorenzo’s past tax assessments, if Lorenzo’s
share of the tax burden were to be reduced in proportion to his wealth (a
volerlo ridurre in quella quantità la quale meritano le sue substantie), the tax
burden on other citizens would need to be proportionately increased. Here,
one needs to understand a tradition of Florentine fiscal practice, which
helps to clarify the preceding passage. Florentines had relied upon a num-
ber of diverse ways of assessing tax burdens (what contemporaries called
distributiones) since the middle of the fourteenth century. One of the com-
mon characteristics of these systems was that each specified the total yield
which the new distribution was meant to fetch to the Treasury. As result,
when an individual’s share was reduced (when, that is, he was granted a
sgravo), it was generally expected that either one or more people’s shares
would be proportionately increased (with an aggravo imposed on them), or
that the total yield of the assessment would be reduced. In the case of the
vast majority of individual tax assessments sgravi required only small com-
pensations in other citizens’s tax share.
In the case of the Medici and their immense wealth, a reduction of their
assessments was bound to require huge adjustments in the share of others’
tax burden. In turn, such an adjustment required the approval of the Si-
gnori and Collegi, an act which was bound to become public and to cause
Lorenzo some embarrassment. The decree goes on to say that, even if
# Brown (1992), 146.

Lorenzo were granted a reassessment of his taxes, he would have been

unable to pay his lower assessment without a grazia (a reduction of the tax
coefficient). In case he did not pay, serious consequences would follow (ez
sarebbe assai di charico non pagando). On the other hand, a reduction of
Lorenzo’s tax assessment following a public discussion would result in
damage to the city, by revealing to the world his precarious financial con-
dition (24/0 stato), and besmirch the city’s reputation. The text of the con-
cession to Lorenzo does not further spell out the reasoning and the conse-
quences of the Seventeen’s decision. Yet, it is fairly clear that in this instance
the decision was made to avoid, seemingly at all costs, an increase of other
people’s tax burden, and, perhaps as significantly, the negative conse-
quences of publicizing the financial difficulties of the city’s principal citi-
zen. It would seem, then, that the need for secrecy was caused not simply
by the decision to favor Lorenzo, but by its consequences on the govern-
ment’s fiscal, and more general political well-being.
If the significance and the full context within which one must analyze
this decree continue to elude us, the facts that interest us are plain. A deci-
sion was made to favor Lorenzo with a concession not available to any other
citizen: the intent of this privilege was to grant Lorenzo a sgravo without
calling it that, without allowing the consequences of this decision to be
borne directly by others, and without making Lorenzo’s situation known to
the general public. The trick was to solve this conundrum within the terms
of the very recently enacted general tax privilege adopted by the Seventeen.
However extraordinary the decision of the Seventeen, in retrospect it
makes a fair amount of sense, if one places it within the context of their
decree of only four days earlier. As we already noted, everyone had been
given the right to use his yet-to-be-earned paghe in order to offset future
tax assessments. For his part, Lorenzo would be allowed to offset his taxes
by using not only his own paghe (or those owned by members of his fiscal
household such as his grand-mother, mother, and wife, and, of course, his
brother Giuliano, assassinated four years earlier at the time of the Pazzi
conspiracy), but also credits he acquired from third parties, or which had
been «conditioned» to him (that is, credits whose temporary usufruct had
been given to him, either as a favor, or after payment to the credits’s owner).
He would also be exempt from paying the customary contract tax (gabella
dei contratti) on other people’s paghe he was to acquire. He could apply
these credits at their face value (the technical expression being, fiorino per
fiorino), whereas other people could only use them at a ratio of 1 to 2 or 1
to 4, and he could use such acquired paghe not only toward his future tax
assessments, but also to pay off his former tax debts, specifically a debt of
3,000 florins he had accumulated with the Monte. (The decree also speci-
fies that Lorenzo might take advantage of the same provision to pay off a
tax debt of an additional 3,000 florins owed by his cousin Pierfrancesco's

children, Lorenzo and Giovanni).
Lorenzo was thus granted a clear and significant privilege. Before fur-
ther exploring the nature of the advantages that would accrue to him
because of the Seventeen Reformers’s decision, it is also important to take
note of the limitations upon Lorenzo’s actions, which the decree clearly
spelled out. He could only use acquired paghe to pay his own gravezze and
nobody else’s; the paghe acquired need be among those already matured
(but, in the Reformers’s unstated assumption, not yet disbursed to their
owners by the Monte officials) at the time tax payments were made; when
paying his assessments, Lorenzo must first use his own paghe, and only
after exhausting them might he be able to have recourse to other people’s.
The most significant of these limitations, was that other people’s paghe
acquired for the purpose of offsetting his taxes (and which were therefore
exempt from the contract tax) could only be used for this purpose. Loren-
zo could not redeem them for cash. The scribe (or the person who drafted
the text of this decree) spelled out this limitation in unequivocal terms: «He
[i.e., Lorenzo] may not redeem in cash surplus paghe [i.e., paghe in excess
of those he needed to pay his taxes] which he might acquire without pay-
ing the ordinary contract tax» (Ma non possa le paghe le quali aquistassi da
altri sanza pagare la gabella ordinaria ribavere in contanti quando glie n'a-
vanzasse, st che solo per le sua graveze et degli infrascripti [sons of Pier-
francesco] usare le possa, et sempre fiorino per fiorino). Thus, the decree
specifically forbade Lorenzo from redeeming at their face value paghe
which he had acquired at discount in the market place, and for whose
acquisition he had been exempted from paying the contract tax. One won-
ders why the decree might contain such a strict and explicit prohibition if
the intent of this provision was, as it was recently suggested, to allow Loren-
zo to raid the public Treasury by withdrawing from it quantities of cash to
which he was not entitled.
If this secret decision clearly spelled out the nature of Lorenzo” fiscal
privilege, the Seventeen wished also to ensure that its application (execu-
tione) would not be met by resistance or worse by future magistrates and
officials. Consequently, they spelled out in considerable detail how this
decision would be enforced. First, the credits acquired by Lorenzo should
be listed in his tax account. Tegghiaio Buondelmonti, a Monte scribe and a
notorious Medici client, or «whoever might in the future exercise that
office» should, without any further authorization, include the paghe which
for any reason belonged to Lorenzo in his tax account (possa et debba
Tegghiaio Buondelmonti, et qualunche a decto [...] et altri in suo luogho [....]
exercitassi al Monte quello uficio el quale lui exercita [...) achonciare le paghe
a decto Lorenzo [...] in alcuno de’ sopranominati modi a [lui al presente o pe’
tempi appartenenti al conto delle sopradette graveze). They then described

the procedure for actually crediting Lorenzo’s tax account with these
paghe. When time came to deduct the value of the credits from Lorenzo’
tax bill, the Monte Cashier (Camarlingo del Monte) or the Cashier of the
office of Forced Loans (Camarlingo delle Prestanze) must act in accordance
with the written orders (po/iza) of Tegghiaio Buondelmonti (or of his future
replacements), and must then properly strike the accounts (achonci le scrip-
ture in buona forma). The text of the decision, in the somewhat convoluted
language of much Florentine legislation, goes on to specify a detail with a
direct bearing on our discussion. It states that «such payments must be
accepted by him [i.e., the Monte Cashier] as if they were cash» (et da [lui
tali polize per contanti steno acceptate nelle sue rimessioni). No reference is
made here to payments of cash, in which case the scribe would have writ-
ten zn contanti. The preposition «per» offered future Monte cashiers the
convenient legal fiction with which to translate into accounting practice the
decree’s provision. The meaning of the passage strikes us as entirely clear:
in his accounting procedures, the Monte Cashier must treat the credits
acquired by Lorenzo from third parties and used for the payment of his
taxes as if they were cash. No future official should raise a question about
the real (market) value of these credits. Lorenzo may have acquired them at
a discount. For accounting purposes they would be treated as if they were
cash. As we shall see, the Monte scribes and accountants did just that, and
repeatedly referred to them as if they were cash.
One final point: the decree’s provisions were to be faithfully applied by
all those with responsibility for executing them. Violators were threatened
with a fine of 100 florins per infraction. Jurisdiction with judging the
decree’s violations was assigned to the Conservatori delle Leggi, who also
had authority to award one quarter of each fine to informers (ofzficatore)
who provided information about the decree’s violations. In short, quite in
addition to specifying with precision the nature of the favor extended to
Lorenzo, the decree provided at once a detailed description of the mecha-
nisms to be used for its execution, and a set of sanctions to ensure its
enforcement. Its details are sufficiently explicit so as to preclude that its
«intention» was anything else than what is stated in it. On the face of it, the
decree of 22 July 1482 left no loopholes for the sort of crude shenanigans
which were recently imputed to Lorenzo and his friends who worked in the
Monte. It specifically banned the type of raid of the Monte treasury which
Alison Brown thinks she has detected in the sources. None of this, of
34 Note the slight error in Brown” text (147, line 3), repeated in the revised version: not
«a llui» but «da Ilui».
course, necessarily means that the decree was faithfully enforced; nor does
it preclude the possibility that, following its promulgation, its provisions
might have been twisted so as to allow Lorenzo to «highjack» public funds
for his own purposes. For the time being, suffice it to note that the decree
of 22 July 1482 does not bespeak the existence of a scheme to blatantly and
patently violate long standing administrative procedures. Better yet, in a
Florentine tradition of long standing, deviations from practice, exemptions
from procedure, and the granting of favors were spelled out within the
carefully ritualized, almost opaque language of existing laws. The façade of
legitimacy was nearly always carefully preserved, and it would be extraor-
dinary that Lorenzo — as masterful a manipulator of Florentine traditions
and institutions as his grand-father had been — had intended to resort to a
clearly illegal action by ensuring that a careful record of the law which he
intended to violate be included in the volume of the deliberations of the
Seventeen Reformers. Lorenzo was much too subtle a politician and his
influence too pernicious and concealed from direct view to make the cur-
rently available explanation of the July 1482 decision plausible. In fact, we
claim that this explanation is, at least in part, wrong.
II.3. This leaves us with the third set of data at our disposal: account
books in which, it has been thought, were registered the cash transactions
(specifically .banned by the decree we just finished examining) which
enabled Lorenzo to enrich himself at the expense of the government. A dis-
cussion of this issue necessarily leads us into territory which is even more
technical than the topics we have heretofore examined. Given the speci-
ficity (and narrowness) of the discussion which follows, it might be best to
start with an explicit presentation of our conclusions. For all the areas of
uncertainty which remain even after our examination of these sources, we
shall argue that the account books, to which reference was made by Alison
Brown, record to a great extent transactions which were authorized by the
decree of 22 July 1482. Furthermore, we have calculated that the grand
total registered in these accounts is roughly equivalent to Lorenzo’s tax bills
during the years 1482-92, and we suggest — as a plausible hypothesis for
which we know that firm evidence is lacking — that the records of most of
the payments in the account books refer to Lorenzo’s use of paghe for set-
tling his tax bills.
Before turning our attention to these books, a small number of prelimi-
nary observations is in order about the nature of the sources at our dispos-
al. The sad fact is that the records of the Monte (several thousand volumes,
and, arguably, the best extant evidence anywhere for the study of a pre-
modern government’s financial policy) have never been properly invento-
ried and it is difficult to study them systematically. A preliminary check-list
of these volumes, prepared for his own use by one of us and for the past
several years available to scholars, remains, nearly a quarter of a century
after its completion, the only, approximate guide through them. As a result,
their condition makes it difficult not only to reconstitute internal series (of
creditors, payments of interest, account-books, deliberations, and the like),
but leaves one constantly in doubt if lacunae in the evidence exist because
of the actual loss of documents, or of the mistaken identification of records
which, summarily and very hastily, were described in this check-list.?? The
only reasonably systematic study of one of these sub-series, devoted to the
history of the Monte delle doti (Dowry Fund), suggests that important sets
of volumes have in fact been lost — or, at the very least, that they are no
longer physically located with the rest of the Monte documents.’
In the case which interests us here, for example, we were unable to
locate a book which would have contained vital information for the present
analysis: the relevant volume, for the Quartiere of San Giovanni (the city’s
Quarter where the Medici resided) of tax payments for the years following
1480. The contents of the last volume in this sub-series (identified in the
check-list as Monte 2490) suggest the sorts of evidence which our volume
might offer: a listing of every tax payment made by Lorenzo de’ Medici
from February 1478/79 to May 1480, the date and the manner in which
these payments were made, i.e., whether in cash, or by write-offs of credits
or of paghe, and the eventual disposition of credits or of paghe accumulat-
ed by the Medici as a result of these payments. A volume which covered
even a year or two of the period which interests us (1482-92) might have
made much of the following discussion redundant by providing the exact
information which, in the current state of things, we are forced to recon-
struct piece-meal and often only tentatively. As it is, if such a volume exists,
we have been unable to locate it.
The same problem, perhaps even more pressingly, is presented by the
state of the account books kept by the Camarlingo del Monte. These are
massive and quite magnificent books, often running to 900 or more large
folios per year, which were systematically kept after a major reform of the
Monte in 1458 to the fall of the Medici regime in 1494. They were meant to
provide an up-to-date, synthetic image of the Monte’s annual condition: not
only its incomes and expenses, but also a collective portrait of owners of
Monte credits, and the movement in their accounts: how many credits in
each account were acquired and alienated (either permanently or condi-
tionally), credits and paghe used for the payment of taxes, and the like. The
5 Ciappelli (1995a).
36 Molho (1994), Appendix 1.
size and weight of these volumes were so imposing that, even in the mid-fif-
teenth century, a decision must have been made to divide each into at least
three more manageable tomes. We know this because the pagination from
one sub-volume to the next is continuous, even if many of them are still
bound in their original, fifteenth-century bindings. Internal cross-refer-
ences also suggest that a proper deciphering of accounts requires the pres-
ence of all of each book’s segments. As best as we can tell, each book” first
section occupied roughly the first 500-550 folios, and provided the individ-
ual information for each investor; the second covered the entire fiscal year,
and listed incomes and expenditures by category; and the third was organ-
ized chronologically, each section devoted to four months which corre-
sponded to the tenure of one of the Monte cashiers, and tracked down
incomes and expenses during that time. Unless we completely missed them,
the first set of these volumes, those devoted to individual Monte invest-
ments, are no longer extant. This is a key loss for anyone interested in
studying the social history of the Florentine public debt. For those intent
on tracking individual or family investments in the public debt, the loss
presents irritating problems, only partially resolved by assembling and
assessing fragmentary evidence with which to try to fill in the gaps of these
account books. In our case, we note that in every single year from 1484-85
to 1491-92 Lorenzo’s accounts contain cross-references to the missing part
of each volume, a gap in our evidence which necessarily renders our recon-
struction incomplete.
We conclude this brief section by saying that, if in the case of Lorenzo’s
tax payments through most of the 1480s we must come to terms with large-
ly absent evidence, in the case of the Monte account books we have before
us evidence which for all its apparent abundance and loquacity remains
fragmentary. For every one of the years from 1482 to 1492, we have avail-
able the two latter portions of each annual volume: one devoted to an
accounting of annual incomes and expenses, the other to the Monte’s
incomes and expenses every four months. We shall turn to that evidence
shortly.
First, however, we present a fact, and a hypothesis attached to this fact.
The fact is this: throughout the last decade of his life, as had been the case
since he succeeded his father as head of his household in 1469, Lorenzo had
to make substantial tax payments. This certainly was also the case during the
last decade of his life. While one can reconstruct quite fully the amounts and
modalities of his tax payments until May 1480,” the available evidence for
the 1480s and early 1490s, as we already pointed out, seems to be lacking.
3? Through Monte Comune, 2490, f. 310r.

7. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND THE MONTE (51
Yet, there exist circumstantial evidence which allow us to arrive at a plausi-

ble figure of the amount of tax Lorenzo would have been asked to pay — not
the sums he actually disbursed, but his tax bill, based on the number of
assessments levied during this period and Lorenzo’s tax coefficient. In
Appendix 2, below, we present the data and the mode of computation on
whose basis we have arrived at this estimate, which is an informed hypothe-
sis of what his tax payments amounted during his life’s last decade. We drew,
above all, on evidence contained in Elio Conti’s magisterial study of the his-
tory of direct taxation in fifteenth-century Florence, and have supplement-
ed it with other bits of information found in other sources. Our conclusion
is that from July 1482, when he was granted the special concession, to April
1492, when he died, Lorenzo was likely to have been asked to pay a mini-
mum of 30,753.1 florins, 20,840.1 florins through November 1488, and an
additional 9,913 florins from December 1488 through February 1491/92,
the last time a tax was levied before his death. Our calculations are as accu-
rate as the present state of the evidence allows, but we are fully aware that
they are based on a number of conjectures and approximations.
Following 22 July 1482, the stage was set for the Monte cashier to open
a new account, where to record the transactions made necessary by the pas-
sage of the decree. Starting in 1482, the Monte’s annual ledgers contain a
section, usually consisting of two pages, on facing folios, on which the
details of these accounts were registered. We would expect these accounts
to contain three types of information: the paghe earned by Lorenzo’s Monte
investments (as well as those of members of his household), since, as the
decree established, he would have the right to draw on other people’s paghe
only after exhausting his own; the paghe he acquired from third parties; and
the actual cash equivalents for which he was credited toward the payment
of his taxes. These three parts were obviously interrelated; in the sections
which follow, we shall examine each, in turn, in order to understand the
possible significance of these payments.
As we already noticed, by the summer of 1482, Lorenzo had been left
with a relatively modest fraction of his family’ s Monte credits. Although
we do not know what the size of his Monte holdings was in the early
38 In what follows, all currencies converted to fiorini larghi at exchange rates contained
in the account books. Slight variants between our figures and those of Brown are result of
rounding. The Monte” fiscal year began on 1 March, and, as a result, its account books were
opened on 1 March of each year and were closed at the end of February.
39 Brown (1992), 123, note 57 (and repeated in revised version). Lorenzo did not «fail»
to declare his Monte investments in 1480. The Catasto law of 1480 required that only real
estate properties be declared. No one declared either business or Monte investments in that
year. Cfr. Conti (1984), 283; Molho (1994), 361-364.
1480s,ì° we do know that by the middle of the decade he himself owned

about 20,000 florins of Monte, and that he could count on credits of his
immediate relatives for an additional sum of approximately the same size.*°
With some luck, if the Monte disbursed interest promptly, if no part of the
interest was withheld in the form of a tax, and if he could draw on the
paghe of all members of his household, Lorenzo could count on being
credited each year with perhaps as much as 1,000 florins in paghe. As it
was, a sort of withholding on paghe was practiced nearly every year, and
small portions of his relatives’s paghe were earmarked for other payments
(the income of Cosimo’s old credit was to be drawn by Bartolomeo Scala,
and Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s credits provided a part of the rent for the
Bagno a Morbo). Starting in the summer of 1482, Lorenzo could thus
count on having perhaps 700-800 florins of interest credited to him.
The ledger in which these paghe for the year 1488 were registered adds
a small bit of information to our analysis. Lorenzo’s principal account that
year was for 15,877 florins of Monte credits. The scribe’s marginal nota-
tion next to the registration of this credit reads as follows: A dî 15 di gien-
nato 1488, 9 [i.e., nine of the twelve monthly payments, as, dating back to
October 1393, the Monte had reduced by one-fourth the interest rate
owed on credits by paying only nine of the twelve months’s actual interest
due] di f 15877 da f 396.18.6 [i. e., this was the sum of the paghe owed to
Lorenzo on. this credit]. Abatti per 2/10 # [symbol of a ladder, which
means scala or decima scalata, the name of the imposition] / 79.7.8 [this
was the withholding tax, equivalent to two-tenths of a decima scalata] resta
f 317.10.10 per le gravezze per deliberazione degli uficiali, a libro 30° a c.
51.4 In other words, the slightly more than 317.5 florins of net paghe
earned by this one account would be written off against Lorenzo”
gravezze. A reading of the decree of July 1482 would lead us to find exact-
ly this sort of notation: that Lorenzo’s paghe be used for the payment of
his taxes, i.e., his gravezze. Nothing unusual here. Certainly, there is no
sign that, six years following its enactment, the decree of July 1482 was
4° In each of the years 1488, 1489 and 1490, for example, he directly controlled himself
two accounts (the largest of which, for 15,877 florins, was still co-listed under his and his
dead brothers name) for 18,363 florins; he was also co-owner together with his business
partners of two more accounts for a total of 2,251 florins; his grand-mother Contessina,
Cosimo de’ Medici’s widow, was listed as owner of 3,168 florins; his grand-father, even a
quarter-of-a-cenrury after his death, was the owner of 500 florins of Monte credits; his moth-
er, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, owned two accounts for a total of 10,053 florins; finally, his wife,
Clarice Orsini, had another 9,647 florins in her name.
*! Monte Comune, 2617 (San Giovanni-Scrivano-Creditori, 1488), f. 106v. At f. 108r, one
reads: «per le gravezze di detto Lorenzo a libro 30° ac. 51».
being twisted around for purposes other than those explicitly authorized
in it.
But the passage just quoted contains an even more telling clue. Having
noted the use of these paghe, the cross reference included by the scribe is
to «c. 51 of the 30th book». It turns out that this 30th book is the ledger of
the Camarlingo del Monte for the year 1488-89, one of the great series of
account books to which we already made reference, for which two of its
three parts are extant.*? Carta 51 was in the missing part of the book, where
accounts of individual Monte investors were listed with notations on trans-
fers of ownership and conditions set on both credits and paghe. Most
importantly, in writing up that year’s entry in Lorenzo’s special account
(which we can read in one of the ledger’s surviving fragments) the scribe
referred to precisely that same carta, no. 51.% In short, the scribe of the
book in which the paghe were listed states that these paghe were to be
applied to the payment of Lorenzo’s gravezze, and refers to c. 51 of the 30th
book of the Monte Cashier. Although we do not have this portion of the
ledger, we know from another section that it is exactly the carta to which
the Monte cashier referred when striking the balance of Lorenzo’s special
account.“ Without a single exception, every other payment of paghe, to
Lorenzo and to members of his household for the years 1488, 1489 and
1490 conforms to this pattern: credit these paghe to his taxes, make a ref-
erence to a carta in that year’s portion of the Cashier’s big ledger which is
missing; invariably, this reference is identical to that made by the Cashier
himself in one of the books’s surviving sections. So far, therefore, the evi-
dence confirms our analysis of the 1482 decree, as it also points to the fact
that the terms of that decree were being faithfully applied.
We now turn our attention to the accounting of the credits acquired by
Lorenzo in the secondary market. This topic brings us more directly to a
consideration of the account-books kept by the Camarlingo del Monte.
There, for every year starting with the fiscal year 1482 (1 March 1481/82 —
28 February 1482/83), we find that in every annual ledger, on a folio very
close to where Lorenzo’s special account was registered, the scribe noted
the names of the individuals and their paghe which had been alienated to
him. The first such registration (transcribed and published by Brown in her
4 They are listed in the current check-list as Monte Comune, 1577, and Monte Comune,
1638.
4 Cfr. Monte Comune, 1638, £. 737r: «Lorenzo [...] de’ Medici de’ avere [...] per ttanti
l’abiamo fatto debitore per la monta delle paghe 1488, c. 51». For a transcription of the
whole passage, see Brown (1992), 161.
4 Brown (1992).
recent article) states that Filippo da Gagliano, Lorenzo’s procurator, should

be «credited for sundry monies (per più denari) transferred (levati) from the
accounts of various and diverse persons [...] in order to credit Lorenzo de’
Medici, which must be paid to him without any other decision or formali-
ty, by virtue of a law in his favor». The verb levare (of which levati above
is the past participle in the masculine and plural forms) is a technical
accounting term, which means that an accountant (or scribe) transferred
from one part of the ledger to another a certain sum of money. Literally, the
term means «to lift»; one could translate it (as Brown recently did) in the
preceding clause as «taken», if by «take» one refers to the terms’s technical
meaning; but it certainly does not imply any impropriety, or arbitrariness on
the part of Monte officials or scribes.
If, as an example, we now examine the operation as it was registered in
the year 1489/90, we note that the formula we encountered in the first such
registration was repeated almost verbatim, and that the scribe listed a total
of 27 names of people whose paghe were transferred to Lorenzo’s account.
For each, one finds a date of transaction, the owner’s name, a reference to
a folio, and the final value of the paghe.# Each of these bits of information
is useful to our analysis. The dates reveal that this operation was initiated
half-way through the fiscal year, on 15 October 1489, and was completed a
little more than four months later, on 26 February 1489/90. As the decree
of 1482 had established, Lorenzo could use other peoples paghe only after
exhausting his own. In this case, it seems that the slightly more than 850
florins of his own paghe” were sufficient to carry him until October, at
which point his procurator, Filippo da Gagliano, began acquiring other
people's paghe. By the end of the fiscal year, on 28 February, he had
amassed a sum he must have considered sufficient for his purposes (or else,
but less likely, Lorenzo’s funds were insufficient to purchase any more). It
came to 1,066 florins, 85 lire, 6 soldi, 3 denart.** The owners of these paghe
belonged to some of Florence’s most distinguished, and in some cases pro-
Medicean families: the Agli, Morelli, Portinari, Pucci, Serragli and others of
that (or near that) standing who had consented that their paghe be trans-
ferred to Lorenzo’s account.
In short, as happened on countless occasions in Florence each year,
» Full text in Brown (1992), 128, note 67.

4 Monte Comune, 1664, f. 739r.
‘7 Monte Comune, 1664, f. 738r, transcribed in Brown (1992), 161. The reconstruction is
based on the fact that the fiscal year started on March 1, and that paghe were paid every
three months.
# Note that our total is 3 so/di higher than the scribe’s.
someone — in this instance, Lorenzo, acting through his intermediary, Fi-

lippo da Gagliano — had entered the secondary market in government
credits, and bought a quantity of paghe from a range of creditors. The
Monte’ books of permute (or changes of ownership of credits) never stat-
ed the price at which these transactions were concluded. That was a private
matter left to the discretion of the contracting parties. What interested the
administrators of the Monte was the identity of the people to whom the
government owed money; that information was properly registered in the
books of permute. But there is no reason to believe that, in this case, Loren-
zo resorted to any other than the standard practice. He bought these paghe,
which means that their acquisition cost him some money. We do not know
how much they cost, what the terms of payment were, whether he was able
to obtain favorable conditions fram the sellers; this information was in all
likelihood recorded by each contracting party in his own, private account
book. Of course, Lorenzo obtained the paghe at a discount, as all paghe
were traded at a discount. And the reason he acquired them was that, hav-
ing bought them at a fraction of their face value (they were being traded at
discounts of 60-70 percent), he could then apply them to the payment of his
taxes at their full, or face value. In short, he was paying his taxes at a pre-
mium of some 30-40 percent.
The point on which to insist here is that the registrations of these trans-
fers of paghe document not so much the illicit payment of government
funds to Lorenzo, as they provide an implicit record of Lorenzo’ outlays of
cash to procure these paghe. The folio reference attached to each name in
the list of citizens who sold their paghe to Lorenzo — as someone who has
had the patience to reach this point of this technical note could perhaps
have anticipated — is to the first (or missing) portion of the Monte Cashier’s
account book, and thus offer an additional, if only indirect confirmation of
the perfect regularity and normality of these transactions. Everything, down
to the most minute and particular detail was being documented in these
books, down to the 2 florins and 10 sold: of Francesco di Antonio Salvelli’s
paghe acquired on 15 October, recorded in Lorenzo’ special account, and
on c. 66, where, presumably, Salvelli’s credits and paghe were registered in
his name. In short, this portion of the evidence also reveals the workings of
a normal, predictable, and unremarkable set of transactions which had
been called for by the decree of July 1482.
If anything at all, one final observation suggests that instructions spelled
out in the 1482 decree were being followed with great punctiliousness. The
Seventeen Reformers had ordered that the transfer of the acquired paghe
and the crediting of Lorenzo’s tax account be recorded as two distinct
moments: fust, achonciare le paghe a decto Lorenzo |...) al conto delle
sopradette graveze «transfer the paghe to the said Lorenzo [...] in the
account of the above-mentioned taxes» and, then, achonci le scripture in

buona forma «strike the accounts».*? As we saw, in 1489 the actual transfer
of paghe to Lorenzo’s account was recorded piecemeal, from mid-October
to the end of the following February. But on the credit side of Lorenzo’s
account in the Cashier’s ledger the entire sum of paghe was entered in one
stroke, on 28 February 1489/90, two days following the conclusion of that
year’ s campaign of acquiring paghe and on the very last day of the fiscal
year.
As was the practice with accounts kept in double entry, the ledger’s right
hand side was devoted to credits owed to Lorenzo and, with the passage of
years, to the account’s running balance. The left hand side was given to reg-
istering the account’s expenses. We finally turn to that side of the ledger, as
it represents the last bit of evidence at our disposal. One preliminary obser-
vation: account books of the sort kept by the Camarlingo del Monte were
recorded in a precise, ritualized language which, however accessible it may
appear, does not always convey an obvious, commonsensical meaning.
Accounts were recorded and transferred, in a complex and geometrically
balanced set of registrations, none of which can often be understood with-
out access to the others. We already noted this problem when discussing
the transfer of paghe to Lorenzo’s name. An obvious illustration of this
point is offered by the dates in which Lorenzo’s account was actually cred-
ited with payments from paghe owed him, or those he had acquired from
others. From the time of the decree’s enactment to his death, the Camar-
lingo made 18 such registrations. But if one examines their dates, one real-
izes that, in all cases, they coincided with internal cadences to the adminis-
tration of the Monte itself: six payments were registered on the last day of
the fiscal year (28 or 29 of February), five were dated exactly four months
later, on 30 June, six at the end of the following quadrimester on 30 or 31
of October, and one, probably a scribal error, on 21 February, the actual
date being 28 of that month. Now, a literal reading of each of these entries
would lead one to think that, in a recurrence similar to that of the festa of
San Giovanni but a week later, on 30 June of 1484, and on every 30 June
from 1487 through 1490 Lorenzo trudged over from his palazzo to the
offices of the Monte and returned back home carrying sacks full of money.
And that he repeated this little exploit at the end of October, and the end
of February. We shall soon examine what the registrations actually suggest
that Lorenzo did or did not do on such days. It strains credulity to think
that the dates of these payments document actual pay-outs to Lorenzo, and
that he, physically, was present on each of those occasions to collect his loot.
4? Brown (1992), 146.

But the dates make sense if one imagines that the scribe was not actually
recording actual payouts, but was consolidating accounts, and registering
transfers of funds from one account to another: the sort of paper operation
which the decree of 1482 had called for.
This accounting ritual is also evident in two formulas which recur with
predictable regularity in Lorenzo’s account: per vigore di legge (i.e., a pay-
ment was made according to law, or according to a specific law), and ebbe
contanti lui detto — or a somewhat more neutral variant, portò contanti, or
ebbe lui detto — the subject of the verb being Lorenzo, to whom the special
account was entitled. The first one of these expressions had no special sig-
nificance for Lorenzo’s account. One finds it not only there, but in nearly
every other payment made by the Monte cashier to any other person. Vir-
tually all payments were made per vigore di leggie, and the reference to this
expression in Lorenzo case does not necessarily refer to (nor does it nec-
essarily preclude reference to) the decree of 1482. Whether because of long
standing tradition, or because of a desire to protect themselves Des
charges of abusing their authority, cashiers relied on this small formula.?°
The other expression, ebbe contanti, is more difficult to interpret. A
commonsensical reading of this formula would seem to suggest that, say, on
30 June 1489, when the scribe used the most exact variant of this formula,
portò e’ detto in contanti, Lorenzo received in cash a sum of slightly more
than 1,587 florins, given him in the equivalent of 8,494 Zire and 5 soldi di
grossi, and that several months later, on 28 February 1489/90, he porto con-
tanti in grossi, an additional 2,269 florins 1 lira 11 soldi and 8 denari. These
were the two payments debited to his account that year. Contrarily, that
same year, he was credited with slightly more than 850 florins in paghe
earned by his own Monte credits. Now, what surely is curious here is the
formula portò in contanti. As we already saw in the volume where Lorenzo’s
own paghe were registered that year (and in the preceding and in two sub-
sequent years — the only ones for which we have located books of paghe for
the Quarter of San Giovanni), next to each entry crediting him with his own
paghe, the scribe inserted what appears to be an unequivocal marginal
notation: that year’s paghe were to be assigned to Lorenzo” gravezze. They
would, in other words, be used as write-offs for that year’s taxes. This is
3° The Monte scribes often relied on the expression «per vigore di leggie» when record-
ing the use of Monte credits for the payment of third parties’s fiscal debts. See, for example,
Monte Comune, 1624 [Permute September-October 1489], f. 16 and following. The formu-
la here is «per paghare le graveze di [...] per vigore di leggie». For another exarnple, see
Monte Comune, 1573, f. 658r: «Comune di Firenze de’ avere pel conto della ritenzione delle
paghe dell’anno 1485 a ragione di 2 decime 1/2 per vighore di leggie».
what the decree of 22 July 1482 had allowed Lorenzo to do. So, we must
entertain the possibility that, at least in this case, when the scribe wrote that
Lorenzo portò contanti he may have referred to a transaction which did not
call for Lorenzo to actually carry away this money in cash. And since the
subject of the verb portò is Lorenzo, one must further wonder how likely it
might have been for Lorenzo de’ Medici, on 18 different occasions in some-
what less than ten years to have made the trip to the Monte office and each
time carry away several heavy bags full of coins. None of the 18 transactions
refers to anyone other than Lorenzo who portò contanti, and given the
punctiliousness of the Monte scribes one must either conclude that Loren-
zo, at the height of his power, lacked trustworthy errand boys, or suspect
that the expression does not mean what it appears to. The standardized
date attached to this transaction reinforces this suspicion.
The passage begins to acquire a different and more plausible signifi-
cance when one remembers that the decree of July 1482 had also allowed
Lorenzo to use his and other people's paghe as if they were cash: when the
Camarlingo del Monte was to mettere tali paghe a uscita, the paghe per con-
tanti had to be acceptate nelle sue rimessioni. The decree had made only one
reference to cash — strictly forbidding them. But it had stated that amounts
of tax write-offs were to be treated per contanti, as if they were cash. And
this is what the scribes consistently did. It might be that, when the Camar-
lingo del Monte used the expression portò contanti (or one of its variants),
he did not refer to an actual cash transaction in which Lorenzo received
sacks of silver currency (gross?) equivalent to the florin amounts for which
his account was being debited. Rather, as envisioned by the decree, the
Camarlingo, drawing on the fiction established in 1482, treated these trans-
fers of paghe — from the books of Prestanze to the books of gravezze — as
if they were cash, per contanti. And treating them as cash meant converting
into silver currency values expressed in gold florins. The last puzzle— unre-
solvable unless one were willing to follow our reasoning — has to do with
the verb porto, carried. But carried in what sense? It is still possible, with-
out knowing the content of the missing part of the register, that the sense
here is not the literal one of physically carrying away, but that it, too, refers
to an accounting fiction.’
?! Our hypothesis about the meaning of this expression seems to be fully born out by two
references in Luca da Panzano’s ricordi (CS, IT s., 9) where one reads on f. 82v: «Richordo
che a di detto [30 maggio 1433] si messe a uscita a Lucha di Lucha Charnesecchi le infra-
schritte paghe, e che io portassi io contanti chome prochuratore Simione Charnesecchi e io,
e io non ebbi danari, anzi ebbi una poliza a Piero da Filichaia camarlingo delle composizione
per gli uficiali del Monte di paghare chon ella suoi catasti, e lle paghe sono queste, cioè [...]
Somma f. 174, Ib. 1, s. 15, d. 4. Di detta soma ischrissono portassi io Lucha da Panzano, e
If placed within the context of the circumstances and analysis which we

presented in the preceding pages, we think that this reading of the sources
at our disposal is plausible — even in the presence of our conjecture about
the meaning of the verb portare. Save for this one weakness in our expla-
nation, every other piece of evidence at our disposal reinforces the view that
the decree of July 1482 did not allow (much less was it intended to allow)
Lorenzo to raid the public Treasury for his own well being: there is to begin
with the decree’s own wording; then the various ledgers and account books
kept by sundry offices of the Monte; even evidence contained in now seem-
ingly lost ledgers, and the perfectly matching cross references to these miss-
ing records teased out of the extant ledgers. All this adds up to one, con-
sistent explanation.
There is one final point which leads to our concluding reflections. As
Alison Brown wrote in her recent article, at the time of his death, Lorenzo’
account was running well in the red. According to Brown’ figures, by
spring 1492, he had been credited with a total of 30,488 florins (the face
value of his own and other people's paghe), and charged with 52,864
florins, for a deficit of about 22,377 florins.?? Our figures might differ from
hers for two reasons: because we have excluded from our calculations
transactions for 1,746 florins carried out following Lorenzo’s death; and
because the total debit should probably be decreased by two charges, for
the years 1490 and 1491, for a total of 6,377 florins,” so that, most proba-
bly, the debits to the account came closer to 44,741 florins and the deficit
was in the vicinity of 14,253 florins. Whatever the account’s exact deficit,
the fact is, as Brown quite properly insisted in her own study, that it ran in
la verità è non ebi danari ma ebbi una poliza a Piero da Filichaia camarlingo delle compo-
sizione de’ catasti, che n’aconc(i)asse catasti di Lucha Charnesecchi, e per detta poliza fe’
tenere chonto a la bottegha mia e porre chreditore Lucha Charnesecchi»; and on f. 152v:
«lachopo di Duccino Mancini a in diposito a Santa Maria Nuova detto di [1451] per resto
di dota de la Marietta mia figluola e per f. 512, s. 0, d. 9 a oro à vere la loro bottegha da
mme e da loro propii d’amendue f. 551 larghi e Ib. 6, s. 2 p., i quali sono per resto d’una loro
ragione in questo a c. 154 ne la faccia indietro, i quali danari tirò innanzi il camarlingo dal
libro de lo spedalingho di Santa Maria Nuova, da c. 35 tirolla a c. 37, e a c. 35 avea detto:
“Portò Iacopo Mancini e Lucha da Panzano”, di poi ca(n)ciellò chome volle Iacopo Manci-
ni e disse: “Rechò Lucha contanti”, non so a che fare si faciessino, ma a c. 35 è ’1 vero de la
chosa, che per vighore la ischritta mi feciono pigliare insino a dì 13 di luglio 1450, ebbi a
dipositare al camarlingo ed èvi il dì e tutto e portai contanti a Lotto, ma ora nonn ebbi né
vidi mai danari, come sa il camarlingo de lo spedalingho de lo spedale di Santa Maria
Nuova».
These figures come from Brown (1992a), Table 1, which revises figures in Brown
(992) 275 ;
3 These figures can be found in Brown (1992), 162 (4,211 f. and 2,166 /.), 164 (1,746 f.).
the red well before Lorenzo’s death. While we know with some precision
where the sums with which he was credited came from, our final question
has to do with the account’s expenses. Why was it run in the red?
Let us then take a close look at the history of this account. For the first
five years of its existence it was run as a self-balancing operation. Small end-
of-the-year surpluses or deficits were made up each successive year. On 1
March 1485/86, nearly four years following its establishment, its running
balance amounted to a small surplus of 585 florins; a year later, it posted a
modest deficit of 450 florins. During those years, the paghe with which the
account was credited were most probably sufficient to cover its debits. At
this point, one of the missing pieces of evidence becomes crucial, for we do
not know the state of Lorenzo” tax bill during those years. In other words,
what taxes was Lorenzo asked to pay; more crucially, what fraction of those
sums were covered by the paghe credited to him? We know for a fact that
in July 1482 he owed the government at least 3,000 florins, and that he was
authorized to pay off his cousin’s children’s tax debt of another 3,000
florins.* These two debts — a total of 6,000 florins — might, or might not
have covered all of Lorenzo’s pending tax bills in the summer of 1482. In
Appendix 2, below, we calculated that by November 1488, his current tax
bill amounted to 20,840.1 florins; to that figure should be added the debt
of 6,000 florins, and any other tax debts accrued before July 1482. In short,
it is possible that by 1487-88 Lorenzo would have owed the Monte at least
23,840 florins for his own tax debts, and 3,000 florins more if he had taken
advantage of the offer to settle his cousin’s fiscal debts, as well. By the end
of 1487-88, his special account had been credited with 20,896 florins (the
total sum of paghe posted in it) and debited with 23,772 florins, with an
overdrawing of his special account for 2,878 florins.
Thus, on the debit side, Lorenzo’s account was running level with his tax
bill. Something then happened in 1488, and in 1488-89 the account was
charged for 8,320 florins more than it was credited that year. The back-
ground of this conjunction of events remains unknown. But the coinci-
dence between the sums credited and debited until 1488-89 is striking. And
this coincidence leads to questions which the state of the documentation
does not allow us to answer. The fact is that the first substantial deficit in
Lorenzo’s special account starts in 1487-88, and that the following year reg-
isters the largest difference between debit and credit until his death, begin-
ning a trend which, with the addition of somewhat smaller deficits each
year (1,925, 5,752, 3,225 florins), resulted in the substantial deficit accu-
mulated by the time of his death, The significance of this debt will remain
24 Brown (1992), 146.

unclear until someone is able to produce better figures for Lorenzo’s tax
bills than we have pieced together, and document more fully than we can,
the strategies he employed to pay them.
IM. In our introductory comments, we wrote that, at the very best, our
contribution to this discussion would be largely negative. A careful reading
of the evidence at hand has led us to suggest that the current interpretation
of Lorenzo’s relations to the Monte cannot be sustained by the sources. The
document discovered by Louis Marks is largely irrelevant to this discussion,
as it postdates Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death and deals with accounts of the
committee charged with administering Medici assets following their exile in
1494. Of course, these accounts might conceal Lorenzo’s debts, some with
the government, for questionable, i.e., private, reasons. But this is specula-
tion not supported by any piece of evidence known to us. The decree of
1482 bespeaks Lorenzo’s altogether unusual standing in the city, his ability
to wrench from the government concessions which no other citizen could
imagine asking, much less obtaining. But the concession granted to Loren-
zo is spelled out in this carefully worded document, and it is different — in
substance, not detail — from the license to raid the Monte’s cash box. Fur-
thermore, it would be strange to think that a strategy devised to allow
Lorenzo to have free access to the Monte would first be applied systemati-
cally only six years later. After all, the decree of 1482 was substantially
respected until 1488. Finally, the account books at once provide support for
our interpretation of the July 1482 decree, and raise questions which, given
the fragmentariness of the evidence, we cannot answer. But a cautious, and
tentative answer should take into account both the contents of the July
1482 decree and various, not insignificant details contained in the account
books themselves. The concession granted to Lorenzo had to do with the
ways in which he could pay his taxes. The evidence in the Monte registers
strongly suggests that the payments recorded in his special account register
the on-going balance of his special account which was to be tapped for the
payment of his taxes.
In light of these arguments, it is necessary to add that Brown’s interpre-
tation implies a set of complications which so far have not been sufficient-
ly taken into consideration. Let us for a moment imagine that instead of
respecting the 1482 decree’s carefully worded terms, Lorenzo simply pock-
eted substantial sums of money with which his account was credited, both
for the value of credits transferred to him and for the overdrafts. One could
imagine that his power in the city was so great as to allow him to disregard
the terms of the 1482 decree. But was his power as great — really, as limit-
less — as also to allow him to violate as well a whole set of other laws and
conventions of Florentine political life? To begin with, Brown’s interpreta-
tion would necessarily imply that, during the 1480s, Lorenzo had fallen in
tax arrears for enormous sums of money. It was a well known fact in Flo-
rence, and the 1482 decree specifically referred to it, that no other citizen
carried as great a tax burden as he did. According to our calculations, for a
decade following 1482 Lorenzo would have been responsible for the pay-
menit of ca. 30,753.1 florins, almost two percent of the government’s entire
intake during that period.” The loss to the state of Lorenzo’s taxes would
have generated a search for other funds with which to cover this shortage,
a state of affairs which the decree of 1482 had specifically stated should be
avoided (et sarebbe assai di charico non pagando). Thus, by raiding the
Monte cash box, Lorenzo would have contributed to a city-wide fiscal
short-fall, inevitably contributing to an increase in the tax burden of all
other Florentines.
What’s more, if we follow Brown’s logic, all the while not paying his
taxes, Lorenzo would have remained politically eligible against the long
established laws of the divieto, which proscribed tax delinquents from
political office. We know that the rules of the divieto were not invoked
against him during the last decade of his life, and that, in the period 1482-
92, he served in a number of offices as one of the Accoppiatori, Operai di
Palagio, Otto di Pratica, Consiglio del Cento, as well as the Ufficiali del
Monte and Diciassette Riformatori.?° Lorenzo’s election to office during the
1480s under the circumstances imagined here would have necessarily
meant that a set of notaries, scribes, and other officials charged with admin-
istering the magistracy of the Tratte, the office which oversaw the election
to magistracies of old kinds, were brought into Lorenzo’s conspiratorial
scheme. Every time his name was drawn to office, and a clerk was asked to
attest to his eligibility, someone would have had to falsify the record to
make it appear that Lorenzo was not in arrears of his taxes. Thus, the con-
spiracy would have implicated not only Tegghiaio Buondelmonti, Lorenzo’s
notorious client and creature, and the Seventeen Reformers, but a whole
string of middling and low rank clerks, all of whom would have been made
aware of this plot. But wasn’t this exactly what the authors of the decree of
1482 said they were trying to avoid, by devising a scheme which was meant
to prevent the dissemination of news of Lorenzo’s malo stato? The only pos-
sible conclusion is that the concessions carefully outlined in the text of the
1482 decree amply bespeak Lorenzo de’ Medici’s emergence as more than
a primus inter pares. These other conjectures are at once implausible and
unrealistic.
? Conti (1984), 340, calculates the annual government intake at 174,000 f. per year.
> Rubinstein (1966), 266-268.
It would seem, then, that, as far as the larger questions about Lorenzo
and his relations to the Monte, we are back to square one. A proper study
of Lorenzo” fiscal strategies would need to address different and more sub-
stantial issues than those we have examined here. Above all, one would
have to deal with three large sets of problems: the Medici bank, the man-
agement of the public debt, especially of the links between the funded debt
and the Dowry Fund, and the short term loans which the Medici — one of
a restricted number of affluent families — advanced to the government
throughout the second half of the fifteenth century. Of these three, it does
not seem to us that much serious study has been devoted to the first and
third, while the history of the funded debt has received a first, preparatory
study by one of us. It is superfluous to dwell on the importance of their
bank for the Medici political success. It would be good, however, to be able
to go beyond generalities and to document, with the requisite precision,
how the bank was used, by the Medici themselves and by various govern-
ment agencies, to collect and pay government funds, in Florence and else-
where. So far, such a study does not exist. There is abundant evidence, only
very partially studied, on the short-term loans which the great banking fam-
ilies traditionally extended to their government, and the power they derived
from their privileged position as the state’s principal creditors, and under-
writers of its floating debt. One should turn to these data to understand
what power Lorenzo was able to derive as one of the state’s premier credi-
tors. Finally, the history of the funded debt’s management shows that,
under Lorenzo’s leadership, very shortly following the Pazzi conspiracy in
1478, a coup de main was staged in Florence, radically altering the relations
between the state and the rank and file of its creditors.”’ Lorenzo’s position
— and that of a handful of other families — was greatly reinforced in the
realm of public finance following 1478, although we lack a clear under-
standing of the specific privileges and advantages which accrued to this
«financial oligarchy». In any case, these three topics — bank, floating debt,
funded debt — offer the proper terrain to be explored by those interested
in studying the relationship between Lorenzo and the Monte, or, more gen-
erally, between the private interests of the state’s creditors, and the well
being of the commonweal.
We could perhaps imagine that a study of the special decree of July 1482
and the considerable, if at points frustratingly inconclusive trail of paper it
left behind it, does not simply take us back to square one, to leave us
stranded there. On one point, and in a decidedly minor key this note does
contribute to the larger issues discussed by other scholars, and only
57 Molho (1994), 68-70.

touched upon in the preceding pages. Lorenzo’s power was rooted in a vari-
ety of expedients, stratagems, and shows of force. Just as Cosimo had done
before him, Lorenzo relied on existing institutions and precedents, subtly
altering them where necessary, but always carefully ensuring that a façade
of legitimacy be preserved. In a long standing Florentine tradition — mas-
terfully illustrated by Nicolai Rubinstein — it was only on rare occasions
that the appearance of tradition was blatantly disregarded. Lorenzo’s power
was at once subtle and insidious, for it was not rooted in the simple exer-
cise of his arbitrium and voluntas. The decree of 1482 illustrates this point
well: it offered Lorenzo a great privilege, it carefully described that privi-
lege, and justified it by reference to long standing practices and institutions.
The rootedness of this privilege in the political and administrative tradi-
tions of the Florentine past formally tempered, but in reality did not com-
promise Lorenzo’s power. In light of the accumulated evidence, historians
interested in illustrating the power derived by Lorenzo because of his priv-
ileged relation with Florence’s fiscal authorities would do well to focus their
attention precisely on those realms where appearance and reality did not
quite match, where Lorenzo and his amzcz, rather than relying on outright
force, made use of subterfuge, evasion, dissimulation, and the subtle per-
version of established tradition. Such insidious practices rather than the
raw application of force, and the unscrupulous trampling over institutional
and political precedents, seem to have made it possible for Lorenzo de’
Medici to dominate his city’s politics.
8.
THE STATE AND PUBLIC FINANCE:
MEO TESI BASE DON THEHISTORY:
OF LATE MEDIEVAL FLORENCE
I. The nexus between arms, riches, and a government’s strength has

been a staple of political and historical literature. Since the time of Cicero
and Tacitus to the fifteenth century and beyond, authors often asserted that
the tranquillity of nations was impossible without armies, armies without
soldiers’ wages, or wages without tribute.! The overwhelming number of
these authors hesitated little in ascribing primacy to the power of money in
bringing about beneficent results, among which the most significant was
the strength of armies and the nation’s internal peace. Pecunia nervus rerum
was the aphorism with which statesmen and political theorists, from four-
teenth-century Florence to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France,
Spain, and Germany, conveyed this common wisdom. Machiavelli was
nearly alone in the premodern era to have boldly asserted that “i danari non
sono il nervo della guerra, secondo che è la comune opinione,” (moneys are
not the sinews of things, as common opinion would have it), training his
polemical attack on contemporaries and ancestors misled into thinking that
money could supplant vzrtz.? Guicciardini corrected Machiavelli’s aim and
softened his friend’s bold dismissal of the efficacy of wealth. But on the
more important point — that war and wealth were inextricably linked in
Italy’s recent politics and that they contributed to a state’s strength — Guic-
! Cited by Stumpo (1984), 227, from Tacitus, Historiarum 4.74: “nec quies gentium sine
armis, nec arma sine stipendiis, nec stipendi a sine tributis haberi queunt.”
2 Machiavelli, Discorsi, 2.10. It may be interesting to note that, as late as December 1498,
six months after Machiavelli’s entrance into government service, a communal scribe repeat-
ed what by then was almost a cliché when registering a new piece of fiscal legislation: “Sap-
piendo el nervo della guerra et il mantenimento della liberta di ciaschuna Republica essere
il danaio,” citizens were ordered to pay a set of new forced loans with which to finance the
war against Pisa (PR, 189, fol. 108v, December 10, 1498). Of course, this maxim was not
known only in Florence. Ludovico il Moro evoked a variant of it when he wrote that
“essendo le intrate el nervo et fermeza de li Stati” (Leverotti [1983], 585).
ciardini could not but support the older man’s assertion. This theme was
echoed by political commentators in subsequent centuries, in a refrain
whose analysis need not detain us here; Michael Stolleis’s treatment of this
subject in German political literature of the early modern era offers more
than a convenient starting point for future explorations.’
In recent times, the consequences, both economic and political, of fiscal
policies and public debts have been discussed by more than a few scholars
— economists and historians alike. But a close variant of the common wis-
dom criticized by Machiavelli — that there is a deep link, something of a
causal effect, between the strength of states and their fiscal policies — has
found renewed currency in the work of a number of sociologically minded
historians, who have returned with some insistence to this old nexus. Nor-
bert Elias, in one of his last works, underscored the connection between
war and taxes, on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing central-
ization and modernization of European states, expressions that in his inter-
pretation seem to carry the same valences that the term rervus carried in the
aphorism of ancient and premodern times. In a passage quoted more than
once recently, he wrote that in the early modern era, when modern states
came into being, “free use of military weapons is denied the individual and
reserved to a central authority... and likewise the taxation of the property or
income of individuals is concentrated in the hands of a central social
authority. The financial means thus flowing into this central authority main-
tain its monopoly of military force, while this in turn maintains the monop-
oly of taxation. Neither has in a sense precedence over the other; they are
two sides of the same monopoly.”*
At roughly the same time, these connections were also being made by
others, perhaps most importantly by a group of scholars led by Charles
Tilly, whose own book, significantly entitled Coercion, Capital and European
States, A.D. 990-1990, itself was published fifteen years after the appear-
ance of an important collective volume on the formation of nation states in
western Europe.’ Even if their attention was focused primarily on French,
English, and Prussian developments, the links that Tilly and his colleagues,
especially Gabriel Ardant and Rudolf Braun, drew between state formation
and public finance offer an initial point of departure for some of the obser-
vations that follow. They claim that public finance became more efficient
because of the pressure of war. In turn, this efficiency contributed to the
modernization of the state. It is inconceivable to think of the modern state
* Stolleis (1984).
4 Elias (1982), 104.
> Tilly (1985), Tilly (1990); see also Anderson (1974); and Mann (1988).
8. THE STATE AND PUBLIC FINANCE 167
without these “two sides of the same monopoly.” Even more recently, Jean-
Philippe Genet, in a variant of Tilly’s view, concluded that in the late Mid-
dle Ages war “opened an era of ferocious competition between states,
which from the fourteenth century onwards had to extract more and more
resources and to invest them into the war-business. States which could not
cope with the tide of conflict just disappeared.”°
If in this article we must address the suggestive hypotheses advanced by
Tilly's and Genet’s schools, there is another large set of questions we must
also take stock of in our discussion. To the degree to which in the past sev-
eral decades scholars have continued their reflection on the nexus between
the state and public finance, Max Weber’s influence has been crucial, with
many historians and sociologists eager to measure the results of their
inquiries against the criteria he presented early in this century. The key here
was Weber’s expression “modern form of bureaucracy,” which has been
variously interpreted, but which, more often than not, has been associated
with Weber’s explanation that “the theory of modern public administra-
tion... assumes that the authority to order certain matters by decree — which
has been legally granted to an agency — does not entitle the agency to regu-
late the matter by individual commands given for each case, but only to reg-
ulate the matter abstractly. This stands in extreme contrast to the regulation
of all relationships through individual privileges and bestowals of favor,
which... is absolutely dominant in patrimonialism.”’
This thought clearly and profoundly influenced much work on the
nature of pre-nineteenth-century states until about a generation ago.
Although there is no need to dwell upon these discussions, when consider-
ing late medieval and early modern Italian developments it may be useful
briefly to return to an oft-cited and significant passage of Federico Chabod,
who, alongside a small group of other historians (among whom perhaps
Antonio Anzilotti should be mentioned here), had reached the conclusion
that the “renaissance state,” most precociously in fifteenth- and early six-
teenth-century central and northern Italy, was characterized by an emergent
nationalist spirit, the slow forging of bureaucracies, and the consequent
increase in the government’s administrative efficiency. Despite the consid-
erable softening of his position in later years, even in his influential 1956
Parisian lecture, he lingered over the renaissance state’s “forte organiz-
zazione centralizzata” and its “organizzazione burocratica centrale.” His
earlier formulation had been even more striking for having called attention
SGeneni(992) MST
7 Weber (1978), 958.
8 For this and subsequent citations in this paragraph, see énfra, ch. 2, and Molho (1990).
to “lo stato impersonale, razionale, legalistico, burocratico, livellatore.”

With the exception of a chapter in his famous book on the state of Milan
during the reign of Emperor Charles V, Chabod did not accord special
attention to the state’s fiscal policies. References to state budgets are large-
ly limited to the effects that the practice of the sale of offices, and of the
consequent “parasitism,” had on the state’s fiscal burdens. The emphasis
throughout was on the forging of a central state administration, and of the
personnel that staffed the new offices — their function, social origins, rela-
tions to prince and court.’
More recently, the teleological and modernizing paradigm of the state
rooted in Max Weber’s concept has been sharply questioned. Its place is
now taken by a more complex, subtle, and variegated image in which nei-
ther the center is as strong and disciplined nor the periphery as weak and
subordinated to the center as an older generation of scholars had imagined.
In this vision, particularistic institutions — in an older interpretation, pre-
cisely the type that the premodern state disciplined and subordinated to its
own authority — continued to thrive in the late medieval and early modern
centuries. Indeed, these were not mere relics of a preceding political and
constitutional order; they gave the early modern state its peculiar and idio-
syncratic character. Collectivities whose privileges and liberties were root-
ed in old feudal grants, corporations of professions and occupations, terri-
? This neglect was not Chabod’s alone. A few years ago, Aurelio Musi examined some
of the reasons for the general neglect of “administrative history” (what he also defines as
the “social history of power”) in the historiography of early modern Italy and suggested
that the prevalence of juridical studies and a long-standing interest in ideological and
abstract expressions of power in the age of absolutism obscured from the view of histori-
ans of the state that history’s fiscal dimension (Musi [1979], 16-17). While Gino Luzzatto,
Enrico Besta, Bernardino Barbadoro, Jacques Heers, Gino Barbieri, and before them Hein-
rich Sieveking were devoting considerable attention to the history of public finance in indi-
vidual Italian states, more often than not their attention was all too sharply focused on eco-
nomic dimensions, on technical innovations in the administration of incomes, expendi-
tures, and debts, on what we might define as the economic and entrepreneurial aspects of
the management of public finances. I think it is fair to say that, at least in the field of late
medieval Italian historiography, the first recent reexamination ofthe links between the state
and public finance was advanced by two non-Italian historians, Louis Marks and Marvin
Becker, both students of Florence. Louis Marks, in his University of London doctoral dis-
sertation and in two pioneering articles (Marks [1954], and Marks [1960]), began to unrav-
el the connections between politics and government finance in late fifteenth-century Flo-
rence. For his part, Marvin Becker’s powerful hypothesis regarding the transformation of
communal government into something alternatively defined as the “renaissance” or the
“territorial “ state has continued to reverberate in works devoted to the history of the late
medieval state, not only in Florence but in northern and central Italy at large (Becker
[1967]).
tories with fiscal, juridical, and even political immunities have now been
placed at the center stage of political development from the fifteenth to
eighteenth centuries. And it increasingly appears that a key feature in the
political organization of states in the period that interests us was not the tra-
ditionally perceived antinomy between center and periphery, whereby one
(the center) was strengthened at the expense of the other; rather, center and
periphery were often strengthened in tandem, in a process of mutual rein-
forcement that allowed the center new juridical and administrative powers
but concurrently strengthened traditional freedoms that institutional and
corporate bodies of the periphery had enjoyed in the past. This, certainly,
is the striking image conveyed in James Given” recent book, The State and
Society in Medieval Europe.
In short, in this new interpretation, premodern states are seen as much
less “integrated” than states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is
thought that they tended to differentiate and to distinguish among their
subjects, that they were not’characterized by the geometric and systematiz-
ing penchants of eighteenth-century reformers and nineteenth-century
statesmen. In Giorgio Chittolini’s conclusion of some years ago, “the Ital-
ian state of the Renaissance is not a modern state, and even less is it an
absolute state.”!! Clearly, there are differences among historians who
uphold this new view. Some are inclined to privilege the position and power
of peripheral institutions and corporate bodies, and even to continue jux-
taposing the “state” with “society,” where by state they refer to agencies of
the central government and by soczety to the customs and practices that pre-
vailed in the periphery. Others look to socially “integrative” processes, such
as clientage, through which premodern states tended to coalesce into inte-
grated political entities. Still others have cast their attention on institution-
al mechanisms either inherited from the past but adapted to changing cir-
cumstances or newly invented to meet the exigencies of governance. What-
ever these differences, the fact remains that the old unitary, integrated,
bureaucratic, modernizing vision of the state has largely been abandoned as
containing more than an acceptable dose of anachronism.
The general picture that emerges from the preceding summary consid-
erations contains one important contradiction. Historians such as Elias,
Tilly, and Genet, having posed a set of questions about the relationships
between, on the one hand, political and institutional developments of late
medieval and early modern states, and, on the other, development of their
!0 Given (1990). |
11 “Non è... lo stato italiano del Rinascimento quello ‘Stato moderno’ o meno che mai
quello ‘Stato assoluto’? (Chittolini [1979], 40).
fiscal policies, concluded that these very fiscal policies were the engines that
led medieval states to transform themselves into modern, centralized ones.
Yet another set of historians, whose focus has been more sharply cast on the
political and administrative histories of those same city-states, has conclud-
ed that the defining characteristic of these states was their stubbornly and
resiliently premodern nature. These historians*have in mind lack of cen-
tralization, fragmentation of authority, and the persistence of administrative
and juridical patterns clearly associated with medieval governance.
The preceding considerations help to focus our attention on the issues
responsible for the contradiction briefly outlined above: When viewed
from the perspective of their fiscal histories, what sort of states does one
identify in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy? Were these states
tinged by the sort of Weberian hues contained in Tilly’s description, or were
they closer to the images conveyed by Chittolini’s and Elena Fasano’s
descriptions? Furthermore, what does an examination of the histories of
these states during an era of nearly incessant war and relentless military
expense do to the view put forth by Elias and others about the unmistak-
ably modernizing impulses brought to bear by fiscal pressure upon the
realm of political organization? In short, on the basis of late medieval and
early modern Italian experience (roughly from the onset of the fourteenth-
century crisis to the mid-sixteenth century), what hypothesis is it appropri-
ate to formulate about the bearing of fiscal policy on the operations of gov-
ernments?
II. For the sake of clarity, it may be best to start with the following
hypothesis: late medieval and early modern Italian governments, beset by
myriad fiscal problems, the most pressing of which was funding the costs of
war, ordinarily sought to address them in an ad hoc fashion in the expecta-
tion that these were ephemeral difficulties to be overcome with the passage
of a crisis. It is generally hard to detect in late medieval and early modern
Italy a steady, much less irreversible, movement from late medieval frag-
mentation to early modern bureaucratic states. Marino Berengo’s dramatic
description of the defining characteristic of early modern Italian states —
their “trionfante particolarismo dei corpi” — captures as well as any short
definition could these states’ principal trait, and, over the long run, the key
element of their fiscal policy as well.
Yet this view of an institutional immobilism over the longue durée often
obscures moments of great political tension when alternate forms of gov-
ernment organization — a different balance between center and periphery
(terms used here not only in their geographic accession) — represented a
clear and well-defined political program. Indeed, on few occasions (and
these, for our purposes, represent important exceptions) some govern-
8. THE STATE AND PUBLIC FINANCE il
ments addressed, seemingly with a long-term political vision and even on

the basis of an explicitly formulated political program, deeper and more
structural fiscal problems of governance. These few efforts — unmistakably
evident in early fifteenth-century Florence, perhaps also in Genova early in
the fifteenth century when the Casa di San Giorgio was created, in Naples
during the 1440s when King Alfonso sought to fashion a new fiscal system,
in Venice toward the end of the sixteenth century when the government
succeeded in extinguishing its huge debt, and no doubt at other times and
places — would seem to bespeak the sort of centralizing penchant some his-
torians have imputed to the Italian states of the period. But these moments,
which reinforced the central agencies of government and eroded local priv-
ilege, did not necessarily (or did not only) depend on pressures of war and
the consequent skyrocketing of military expenses, but on the internal poli-
tics of regimes in power. External pressure and exogenous factors, such as
war and military costs, should be seen as necessary but not sufficient caus-
es in contributing to such change.
Missing from many discussions on the history of the relations between
fiscal policy and state making is a credible internal dimension — the state’s
politics, its power balances and social tensions, and the ideological orienta-
tion of politically active classes. Thus, to cite one (no doubt extreme, and
in this sense perhaps atypical) example that will be analyzed below, war and
its attendant fiscal consequences produced an unprecedented degree of
institutional reorganization in early fifteenth-century Florence. Yet, from an
institutional perspective, war and fiscal pressure produced little change of
consequence in the very late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Thus,
an examination of late medieval Tuscany raises the possibility that the cur-
rent historiographic tendency, which takes the fragmentary and decentral-
ized nature of premodern states for granted, might need some refinement.
At least in the Tuscan case, this fragmentation appears not as a deep and
immutable structure but as the outcome of a political process. A regime
that had come to power in the early 1380s set out to fashion a political pro-
gram based on the very much greater concentration of authority in the
offices of the central government. The defeat of this regime in the fourth
decade of the fifteenth century resulted in the abandonment of this politi-
cal program, although, perhaps not insignificantly for our hypothesis, not
of the institutions forged by the preceding regime, which had aimed at the
greater concentration of powers in the central institutions of government.
Thus, those who discard the older view — which, for the sake of argument,
we might associate with Weber or Chabod — and replace it with one that
highlights the late medieval and early modern state’s chronic and allegedly
inherent inability to strengthen its core overlook precisely the evidence that
suggests a movement from a policy promoting more centralized govern-
ment operations (which, for the sake of hypothesis, we could define as a

more clearly discernible if inchoately bureaucratic Florentine territorial
state) in the early fifteenth century to a more fragmented, patrimonial
grand-ducal state in the sixteenth.
III. An overview of Italian history during the centuries that interest us

could easily identify a number of circumstances that endowed Italian states
with a common history and cohesion. Among these circumstances, war and
all its consequences were among the most important. The need to marshal
unprecedented large material resources with which to defray the expenses
of war was shared by all major Italian states; the phenomenon has been
studied most recently by Luciano Pezzolo, who briefly but efficiently pro-
vided especially graphic quantitative evidence to measure it.!? But beyond
the community of experience created by war and its consequences, there
were other traits, of a more narrowly fiscal nature, shared by late medieval
Italian states. Of these, three deserve attention.’
The first pertains not only to medieval Italy but also to much of late
medieval and early modern Europe: a deeply ingrained aversion to impos-
ing direct taxes on citizens. Wherever one turns — in Italy as in Germany,
Flanders, or France — one encounters more or less the same phenomenon.
With the increase in military expenditures stemming from the fourteenth-
century crisis, ordinary revenues were no longer sufficient to cover needs.
Although in France, wherever the monarchical government was consoli-
dated, systems of direct taxation (the taz/le) were imposed, in central and
northem Italy (and in those areas of Germany and the Low Countries where
forms of urban government prevailed, especially in cities dominated by
entrepreneurial elites) direct taxation upon legal residents of each territori-
al state’s capital was carefully avoided. There was a correspondingly marked
preference for loans (often forced loans, imposed overwhelmingly on the
capital’s residents) intended to make up shortfalls of income from indirect
taxes.
To be sure, there were moments in the histories of most states when,
because of overriding circumstances, recourse was made to direct taxes. In
Florence early in the fourteenth century both Charles of Calabria and Wal-
ter of Brienne imposed direct taxes, but the failure of their regimes
doomed, for generations thereafter, this fiscal option. Even the direct tax
(decima) on income from real property instituted during the crisis-laden
mid-1490s when the popular regime of Girolamo Savonarola was in power,
'2 Pezzolo (1988).

3 For the following paragraphs, see infra, ch. 4.
was quickly abandoned in favor of the more traditional interest-bearing

forced loans (accaztz).'4 Similarly, in the 1330s, Simon Boccanegra made a
comparable attempt in Genova, with no more enduring success.” In
Venice, following the collapse of the Monte and at the outset of the war
against Turkey, the decima was imposed in 1463, but less than twenty years
later renewed recourse was made to borrowing.'° But in Milan, even in the
depths of the crisis in the 1490s, Ludovico il Moro did not entertain the
possibility of imposing a direct tax on Milanese citizens. Loans, alienation
of gabelles, requests for subsidies from the communities — these were the
expedients to which the Milanese sigrore resorted to close the gap between
incomes and skyrocketing expenses.'’ Only in the kingdom of Naples,
whose history diverged on so many counts from the histories of other Ital-
ian regions, does it appear that income from direct taxes weighed more
heavily than that of indirect taxes, amounting as it did to nearly two-thirds
of the government’s regular income.'®
If contemporary governnrents shied away from direct taxes on citizens’
property (regardless of whether it was located in the capital city or in the
territory), no such hesitation defined fiscal policies toward residents of sub-
ject towns and territories. The estz7zo was the standard if variably success-
ful form of revenue-raising from these areas. The point that bears empha-
sizing here is that, throughout, a principle of fiscal policy was the differen-
tiation by status of taxpayers: everyone, of course, was subject to gabelles
and to the salt tax, some were subject to forced loans, others to the estimo
or decima. There is little question but that citizens of the state’s capital
received preferential fiscal treatment while contadini and distretiuali tried,
when they could, to transfer their legal residence to the capital so as to
lighten their fiscal burdens. A further element of this system was that,
because each one of these territorial states had been created over time and
under a variety of circumstances, no state had a uniform fiscal policy
toward its towns and territories. Some towns had been purchased from
their previous overlords; others had surrendered to their more powerful
neighbors; others had been conquered, some after brief warfare, a few fol-
lowing protracted siege; still others had been acquired by diplomatic
maneuvers. Circumstances surrounding the incorporation of each of these
towns into its territorial state tended to define its fiscal regime and the taxes
4 Barbadoro (1929); Conti (1984).

5 Petti Balbi (1991), 94-103.
'6 Luzzatto (1963), 244-65; Knapton (1986), 324-28.
17 Leverotti (1983), 589.
'8 Galasso (1992), 756.
— their nature and size — owed to the capital city. Here again Naples seems
to represent an exception, for the focatico Alfonso imposed on his kingdom
in the 1440s was meant to be applied on his entire domain.!°
Thus, a defining characteristic of fiscal structures in these states was the
fragmentation and differentiation of fiscal regimes: ‘status and residence
mattered, and their importance tended not only to be confirmed by tradi-
tion but was often reiterated in diplomatic and other legal documents as
well. This legal and ideological sanctioning of differentiation, and its
defense in the name of ancient customs or liberties, made it difficult for any
government to raise incomes substantially from its territories. Of course, all
governments tried, and the case of Venice toward the end of the fifteenth
century shows that some were more successful than others.?° Still, one sus-
pects that these traditional fiscal arrangements, by bestowing such evident
advantage on residents of capital cities, made fiscal policy even less flexible.
For how could governments continue to increase tax loads on the periph-
ery when wealth was so much more heavily concentrated in the capital,
which, by comparison, was being undertaxed, and the periphery’s fiscal sta-
tus was sanctioned by law and by more or less ancient tradition?
The funding of public debts in many of these states — but, significantly,
not in Milan and other signorial regimes — was the third common charac-
teristic to which reference should be made here.?! In times of endemic war-
fare, given the inelasticity of the government’s revenues from available
taxes, the need for added resources led to the imposition of an increasing
number of forced loans. Revenues from gabelles were used to pay interest
to creditors, so that an evident and direct relationship existed between the
burden of indirect taxation on the populace at large and the frequency with
which a government borrowed from its citizens. Obviously, such a distri-
bution of fiscal burdens was favorable to the wealthy and discriminated
against the poor. Outstanding credits of these debts, freely traded in sec-
ondary markets but almost never outside the territory controlled by the
government that had issued them, tended to be concentrated in the hands
either of the well-to-do or of the charitable institutions to which they had
been given in order to support various endowments. Servicing the public
debt through indirect taxes, which then as now proportionately strike the
less affluent, resulted in a steady upward circulation of wealth and an
increasing accentuation of economic imbalances. While contemporary
politicians often understood this problem (see, e.g., Boccanegra’s attempt
'° Galasso (1992), 754-55; Ryder (1976), 210-13.

20 Lane (1973), 237-38.
*! This and the following paragraphs summarize infra, ch. 4.
in Genova and the Ciompi’s in Florence either to cap, essentially, the size of
the debt or to contain the rate of interest paid to creditors), governments
found it difficult to reduce their reliance on borrowing because recourse to
loans made it possible for them to obtain large resources without raising the
tax burden. In the long run, of course, the debt would be serviced by forc-
ing everyone to pay higher taxes. But in the short run, governments could
raise funds and correspondingly enhance their power to act without an
immediate tax increase. The inelasticity of the government’s regular rev-
enues could partly be made up by the flexibility of this system.
There is another point on which it may be important to dwell briefly.
This complex of fiscal strategies — the widespread recourse to loans, to
indirect taxes with whose revenues to pay the debt’s carrying charges, and
to direct taxes imposed on inhabitants of the countryside and of subject
cities — was common in many cities, both in Italy and elsewhere. To finance
themselves, governments also turned to foreign lenders, usually important
figures or rulers of signorial regimes, happy to invest in the public debts of
commercial cities. One of the peculiarities of central and northern Italian
cities was their ability to round up the liquid cash necessary for their needs
largely within their own economies. They did not have to make use, as many
northern European town governments did (at least not in a massive way),
of foreign capital. This meant that unlike, say, the cases of fifteenth-centu-
ry Douai or Hamburg, whose public debts were overwhelmingly held by
foreigners, or of Naples, among whose creditors one finds a large number
of Genoese investors, the histories of late medieval public debts in the prin-
cipal central and northern Italian states help to focus one’s attention on
their internal histories and political tensions.
The picture that emerges from the preceding considerations suggests
that it would be difficult to detect in the fiscal policies of any one of the Ital-
ian territorial states in the late medieval centuries a unified and coherent
plan. To be sure, some general principles of the sort just mentioned —
avoidance of direct taxes on citizens of each capital city, differentiation of
fiscal treatment according to residence and social status, reliance upon
deficit financing — confer a retrospective coherence on these fiscal policies.
But, evidently, this is a retrospective cohesion, easier for historians to recon-
struct a posteriori than to document in contemporary treatises or disquisi-
tions on fiscal matters. When dwelling upon their fiscal woes, something
circumstances constrained them to do at regular intervals, politicians and
government clerks overwhelmingly tended to see only patchworks of poli-
cies. Rare is the contemporary document that contains more than a gener-
al, often moralistic prescription about ways of enhancing the state’s rev-
enues. Rarer still is such a prescription adopted by a government. No state
— not even Naples, in whose fiscal history some historians have detected
traces of a coherent, unified, and systematically applied policy — seems to

have moved very far during the course of the late fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries toward fashioning a comprehensive set of principles with which
to account at once for the financial needs of the government, the wealth of
its inhabitants, and the exigencies of the moment.”
Of all institutions to which recourse was made by late medieval Italian
governments to address their fiscal needs, none appears more of a true
innovation than the public debts, which were funded variously from the
mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries. And no other fiscal insti-
tution illustrates as clearly as these public debts do the limits — of
resources, political will, and imagination — to which the management of
public finance was subject in the city-states of the late fourteenth, fifteenth,
and early sixteenth centuries. The undeniable institutional novelty of these
public debts, and the cultural ramifications of their creation — characteris-
tics that recently gave rise to some very interesting discussions? — should
not obscure the (perhaps predictably) conservative political consequences
of their management. Public debts in Italian city-states helped to consoli-
date the domination of existing ruling classes and to render them more
resilient to change.
For all the fascination these debts have provoked in scholars (and, quite
amazingly, in an increasing number of amateur historians),” this is not the
occasion to ‘dwell upon their histories, which, in their broad outlines, are
rather well known. It will suffice, perhaps, to remember that, despite the
initial differences among them, by the fifteenth century the three most
important of these debts, in Venice, Florence and Genova, had increased
manyfold, that they represented immense values of wealth invested in them,
and that they required huge outlays for their servicing. By the late four-
teenth century, financing the debt generated persistent social tensions, for
in Genova, Florence, and Venice its carrying charges consumed consider-
able fractions (from 20 to 40 percent) of each government’s regular
incomes. Thus, however convenient the instrument of borrowing may have
been, and whatever flexibility it may have allowed governments, by the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries financing these debts created
administrative, fiscal, and political problems.
Every government sought a vast range of expedients to discover new
sources of income: despite widespread discontent, especially among the low
* Ryder (1976); and Del Treppo (1986); but see also the comments of Tabacco (1990), 48.
2 For a brief recent overview, see infra, ch. 4.
2 Becker (1967); and Chittolini (1988), 28-31.
5 Goldsmith (1987), ch. 9; Veseth (1990), chs. 2 and 3.
8. THE STATE AND PUBLIC FINANCE ea
and middling classes, the burden of the gabelles was considerably increased
by raising their tariffs, imposing new ones, and not infrequently manipulat-
ing the currency in which their payments could be made. Moreover, one
finds an aggravation of the tax burden borne by subject communities and
territories, and an attempt to strike at ecclesiastical wealth, to limit the
effects of mortmain, and to increase taxes imposed on Jews. On different
occasions and in particular political circumstances, governments imposed
severe penalties upon taxpayers in arrears of their taxes. All these initiatives
were intended to increase revenues. Beyond this, there was a parallel effort
to reduce expenditures, to render the administration of magistracies more
efficient, and in particular to decrease the expenses of the public debt.
Thus, throughout, interest rates promised to creditors were reduced, pay-
ment of annual interest on the debt was deferred, and part of the interest
due was converted into credits of the debt itself (with an obviously coun-
terproductive effect, since while at the moment of conversion there was an
immediate decrease in the amount of ready cash needed for the debt’s car-
rying charges, the debt itself increased, as did the sums needed to finance it
in the future). In some cases, part of the interest received by creditors was
withheld, a de facto imposition of a direct tax.
The situation just described is fully recognizable by anyone even super-
ficially familiar with the recent literature on the finances of the late
medieval Italian republics. Nearly all scholars who have written on this sub-
ject have emphasized the need of contemporary governments to rely on
forced loans, given what for both cultural and political motives proved to
be a rigidity — a nearly insurmountable limitation — in the fiscal adminis-
tration of the period. This limitation, the striking inelasticity of incomes in
the face of a seemingly infinite elasticity of expenses, did not characterize
only the histories of governments that had important public debts. In addi-
tion to Venice, Florence, and Genova, Milan, Rome, and Naples faced the
same chronic shortage of incomes, a constant stimulus to reexamine fiscal
operations by introducing measures that might alleviate the chronic fiscal
crisis, enlarge the government’s tax base, reduce resistance to new taxes,
and streamline, where possible, fiscal administration. In general, these
efforts were successful only in part.
To examine one situation at close range, observe the contexts in which
such efforts at streamlining and strengthening fiscal agencies were carried
out, and, finally, present the elements on which the hypothesis presented
above was constructed, I shift my perspective and, in the next section, focus
attention on Florence. I hope that two points will emerge with some clari-
ty in the course of the following overview: the importance of rooting a dis-
cussion of administrative reform — in this case the organization of Flo-
rence’ fiscal apparatus — within a specific political context; and the con-
tingent and often strikingly provisional nature of efforts to enhance a gov-

ernment’s authority and centralize its administration.
IV. We begin on January 1, 1383-84, when Lionardo di Niccolò Becca-

nugi, provveditore of the Camera del Comune, started a new series of
account books, to my knowledge unique in the annals of Florentine histo-
ry. The scion of an important family, who had distinguished himself in polit-
ical life during the turbulent 1370s and who had consistently embraced a
firm and cautious policy in diplomatic and fiscal matters,?° Beccanugi wrote
that in this new book “will be written all of the Florentine Chamber’s
incomes and expenses, each account separately, and also all the incomes
and expenses of the gabelle [indirect taxes] of the said commune of Flo-
rence, and every other item which will appear to me necessary for clearly
discerning all necessities with regard to the said commune’s incomes and
expenses, beginning in the kalends of January, MCCCLX XXIII, and end-
ing on the last day of December 1384. May God, who is father and lord,
grant grace so that there may ensue praise and reverence, the said commune
af Florence’s good and profit, and my honor”???
This was the first time since the establishment of the Camera in the late
thirteenth century that one agency would account for all the government’
incomes and expenses. Until the beginning of this set of books, the Cam-
era’s ledgers excluded extraordinary taxes, imposed to defray specific
expenses; such taxes were accounted for in the books of the magistracy
charged with meeting these expenditures. Even ordinary revenues were
often assigned well before their collection to one or another agency, whose
clerks then recorded their accounting. In short, as often as not, before the
1380s there existed no central government recording of all incomes and
expenses, no way for a government official, or for a modern historian, to
have an overall view of the state’s resources and its liabilities.?8 Now things
26 Brucker (1977), 275,n. 92; 322, n. 97; 329, n. 123.

77 “Si schrivera tutta entrata e uscita della chamera del comune di Firenze, e ciascheduna
ragione di per sé, e appresso tutte entrate e uscite delle gabelle del detto comune di Firen-
ze, e ogn’altra cosa che mi parra che bisogno sia a chiarezza di potere vedere quanto sarà di
bisogno intorno alle rendite e uscite del detto comune, comminciando in kalendi di gennaio,
anno MCCCLXXXIII e finendo a dì ultimo di dicembre 1384. Idio ch’é padre e signore ne
concieda grazia di fare sì ché sia laude e reverenzia, e bene e utile del detto comune di Firen-
ze, e mio onore” (Camera, Provveditori e Massai — Entrata e Uscita, I, fol. 1r, Archivio di
Stato, Florence).
2 On the early Camera, see Gherardi (1885), 3-51; Davidsohn (1973); Becker (1967).
For the history of the Camera in the decades immediately preceding the period treated in
this article, see De la Roncière (1968), 140-92.
were to change, and a central accounting agency would gather all the infor-
mation necessary for keeping track of the flow of money in government cof-
fers. In fact, careful examination of the series begun by Beccanugi shows
that government incomes, regardless of whether they were assigned for col-
lection directly to specific magistracies, were recorded in these books.?°
Every item in the government’s incomes and expenses is carefully itemized,
from ordinary gabelles, to forced loans, to, significantly, extraordinary
taxes, each accounted for separately.?° For every one of these taxes, we can
trace not only the sum it produced each year and the provenance of its
income but also its allocation — to government agencies authorized to
spend specific sums of money. As we shall see, these books were continued
until the early 1430s, with a succession of prominent politicians following
Beccanugi in this office. By 1388, the provveditori had become two, and the
description of their charge was even more precise. That year’s officials,
Iacopo di Francesco Arrighi and Nigi di Nerone di Nigi, described their
book as “the mirror,” lo specchio, in which “will be written in an orderly
fashion all incomes of the commune of Florence, their sources, and where
and to whom the said moneys will be given, so that it will clearly be shown
by this book all of the commune’s and of the chamber’s affairs which refer
to the commune’s incomes and expenses.”*! By 1420 Rinieri Baronci,
scrivano of the provveditori, would express even more sharply his intent in
compiling the year’s accounts in the preamble of that year’s book. In it, he
would write “the state of the Magnificent commune of Florence.”
There is no trace of a formal decision that required the provveditori of
the Camera to undertake such systematic and methodical record keeping;
one can even imagine the remote possibility that the first book was begun
2 One example taken from this first volume: in the period December 30, 1383-Decem-
ber 25, 1384, the gabella delle porte had an income of 428.775 £ 5 s. 7 d.; it spent 428.476 £
6s. 10 d., of which 12.254 £ 12 s. 2 d. was for its own administrative expenses; the remain-
der was assigned, as required by law, to a variety of other magistracies (Camera, Provvedi-
tori e Massai — Entrata e Uscita, 1, fols. 442v-443r, Archivio di Stato, Florence). For a some-
what more detailed analysis of these books, see Molho (1971).
3° One example among many: Camera, Provveditori e Massai — Entrata e Uscita, 11, fol.
207, for the year 1395: estimo straordinario imposto del mese... di fiorino 1 alla lira. The col-
lection of this special tax began on May 17.
31 “Si scriverà ordinatamente tutte l’entrate del chomune di Firenze, e onde dette entrate
venghono, e chosì tutte l’uscite del detto chomune, e dove e a chui i detti danari si daranno,
siché chiaro si mostrerà per questo libro tutti i fatti del chomune e della detta chamera,
appartenenti a entrata e a uscita del chomune” (Camera, Provveditori e Massai — Entrata e
Uscita, 5, fol. 1r).
32 “Lo stato del Magnificho chomune di Firenze” (Camera, Provveditori e Massai —
Entrata e Uscita, 28, fol. Ir).
by Beccanugi on his own initiative and that it was continued by his succes-
sors in office. Even so, one cannot doubt that the systematic continuation
of these books for nearly half a century — with the same format and atten-
tion to detail— bespeaks the existence of a political vision that assigned to
the government responsibilities and powers it heretofore had lacked. The
“facts” revealed in this public “mirror” were bound to generate a new sense
of order and discipline; their accumulation, year after year, would enable
those in charge of policy to have a clearer understanding of the magnitude
of the resources on which they could reasonably count. Just as was the case
with entrepreneurs, who during precisely those decades were developing
new techniques of accounting with which to obtain better control of their
business affairs, the “books of income and expenses of the overseer of the
Chamber of the commune of Florence”,}} gave rise to new possibilities of
power and of its application outwardly from the government’s fiscal core.
The point was not lost on a particularly acute contemporary observer who
wrote that “the regulators [szc’] must always tend to all the Commune’s rev-
enues and incomes, so that they may be well maintained and not be com-
promised; ensure that the Commune not be cheated in its expenses; have
all the Cashiers’ accounts overseen; and ensure collection from whoever is
the Commune’s debtor.”
The history of the Florentine fiscal agencies cannot be detailed here.
The example of the provveditori illustrates with particular eloquence a
point that strikes me as important for our discussion. Starting in the mid-
dle of the fourteenth century — as Marvin Becker argued several years ago
— the Florentine government experienced a series of unprecedented crises.
A succession of wars, epidemics, fiscal crises, and political tensions began
to transform its very foundations, generating a consciousness, evident in
men such as Matteo Villani and Marchione di Coppo Stefani, that new
instruments of governance and new attitudes toward the government were
necessary. In addition to the redaction of the statutes in 1355, perhaps the
most important institutional innovation of those decades was the funding
of the public debt (Monte comune) and the government’s systematic
recourse to public credit in order to meet its unusually high military needs.
It was only after the massive defeat of the Ciompi and of their corporate
ideology, the establishment of a regime dominated by the elite of the arti
3 Dati (1904), 151.

4 “Regolatori [sic/] hanno a provedere sempre a tutte le rendite e entrate del Comune
che le si mantengano bene e non sieno maculate, e’n tutte le spese che si fanno provedere
che il Comune non sia ingannato e fare rivedere le ragioni de’ Camarlinghi e fare riscuotere
da chi è debitore di detto Comune” (ibid.).
maggiori, the triumph of a new aristocratic and socially repressive ideology,

and the elimination from the political arena of the preceding generation’s
social tensions that the city’s ruling class undertook an impressive array of
changes whose cumulative outcome was to recast many of the territorial
state’s institutional infrastructures.”
Fiscal matters were close to the center, but certainly were not the only
elements in this array of institutional change.’ At the heart, and in some
ways the culmination of this tenacious reorganizing penchant, was the dou-
ble redaction of the statutes in 1409 and 1415, entrusted to two of the age’s
premier jurists. Activities perceived as subverting the social order — prosti-
tution and homosexuality — and institutions such as convents and confra-
ternities were more closely regulated. The government set out to buttress
the city’s fragile economy: a fleet was constructed and attempts were made
to introduce new crafts and industries, most important, to strengthen the
production of silk cloth. The regime also pursued an aggressively expan-
sionist policy, managing to efilarge considerably the bounds of its territory,
bringing under its jurisdiction, by conquest or purchase, Arezzo, Pisa, Cor-
tona, and Livorno. In addition, Andrea Zorzi has shown that the adminis-
tration of the territory was put on a new footing and that a wide-ranging
process of reform was undertaken by the dominant regime, aimed at
streamlining and making the state’s apparato giudiziario more dependent
upon executive authority.” And, of course, during those very decades, a
new ideology was being forged by some of the government’s principal
clerks, who urged their audiences to embrace a new social and political
ethic. Signs of institutional innovation and, perhaps more crucially, of the
regime’s eagerness to strengthen the government’ authority are abundant
during those decades.
Fiscal innovation in which this period also abounds should be set in the
broader context of the political design of the regime. Given the unprece-
dently expensive wars fought by Florence during those decades, the elabo-
rate and inevitably tortuous initiatives for raising funds with which to pay
soldiers nonetheless have in common a set of principles, part of the broad-
er design to which I have already referred.’* In its aim to raise the vast treas-
3 Brucker (1977); Najemy (1982).

36 Many of the developments mentioned below can best be followed in Brucker, but see
also Riccardo Fubini’s numerous and very important contributions, among which is Fubini
(991);
7 Zorzi (1990) and Zorzi (1991).
8 The broad outlines of fiscal policy can be followed in Molho (1971) and infra, ch. 6;
and Conti (1984).
ure with which to fight its wars, the government followed two general, if
inchoate, guidelines: manage the debt so as to allow the government con-
tinued access to sources of credit controlled by the very social class that,
during those decades, comprised the city’s political elite; and create as
much of a unified fiscal structure as possible so as to reduce the influence
of intermediary collectivities (neighborhoods in the city; parishes and other
administrative units in the countryside and in subject cities) which, in the
preceding era, had exercised a key role in the allocation of fiscal burdens.
The management of the public debt during the years 1382-1433 repre-
sents one of the most intriguing and complex chapters in the city’s history.
For our purposes, suffice it to say here that during those years the govern-
ment applied a combination of stringent and inventive policies to ensure
that the Monte would continue to operate properly. The fiscal burden was
increased across the board, especially on the vast majority of the territorial
states disenfranchised inhabitants — most important, on the urban mid-
dling classes and on residents of the contado and distretto — to ensure that
the discount prices of Monte credits would remain high and interest to the
Monte’ creditors was disbursed so that, in turn, they would continue
advancing loans to the state. The size of the public debt continued to
increase unabated during those decades, with the result that the govern-
ment ensured (in fact, it forced) the transfer of a substantial amount of
wealth from less to more affluent inhabitants. Renewed war against Milan
in the early 1420s, and the leadership’s disastrous miscalculation later in
that decade to launch war against Lucca, resulted in fiscal pressure that
until then had been unimaginably high. In the midst of this crisis, the gov-
ernment stepped in, and in one of the most ingeniously imaginative inven-
tions, it created the Monte delle doti, an agency that combined, as never
before in the city’s history, citizens’ private interests and the government’s
financial strength.” For if the advantage the Monte delle doti offered pri-
vate investors was that they could ensure the availability of dowries for their
nubile daughters, in return the government counted on diminishing the
funded debt’s carrying charges by rolling over substantial portions of that
debt through the Dowry Fund. The failure of this plan to provide lasting
fiscal relief as its inventors had imagined should not obscure the ingenuity
of this idea. The point was that exigencies of war and the resulting fiscal
pressures had led the political leadership to produce a new government
institution that, unmistakably, insinuated itself in one of the most private
realms of citizens’ and subjects’ social lives, the marriages of their offspring.
The initiative that resulted in such intermingling of private and public inter-
3? Kirshner (1978); Kirshner and Molho (1978), 403-38; and Molho (1994).
ests was congruent to numerous other such initiatives of those decades, all
of which led to considerable strengthening of the government.
If the maintenance of the Monte’ good health was one of the regime’s
two overriding fiscal objectives, the second was the diminution of the influ-
ence of intermediary collectivities, which in a preceding era had determined
taxpayers’ assessments, and the establishment of the clear principle where-
by every taxpayer was directly responsible to an agency of the central gov-
ernment for the determination and payment of his overa. The distribution
of fiscal burdens, in Florence as in nearly every other medieval commune,
had always represented a delicate and contentious political issue. The dis-
tributio onerorum had been widely debated throughout the fourteenth cen-
tury and first two decades of the fifteenth century.“ In this regard, with the
imposition of the catasto, the regime established at least three important
principles: first, that objective criteria in the computation of tax assess-
ments (or distribution of forced loans) would be applied across the board
to large categories of taxpayers (citizens of Florence, inhabitants of the con-
tado, residents of subject cities) so that, in theory, every contributor would
be able to compute his (or her) assessment. The second principle was root-
ed in the first: individual contributors would now be responsible for the
payment of their taxes and forced loans to the government itself, and not to
some local committee consisting of neighbors or local officials. Finally, the
decision to distribute taxes and forced loans according to objective criteria
resulted in the creation of a vast new archive of government documents —
the declarations of wealth submitted to the catasto officials by the territory’s
citizens and subjects, and the official summaries of these documents pre-
pared by clerks — which made it possible for government agents to check
the veracity of future declarations of wealth. Repeatedly during the fif-
teenth century — as late as 1480 — catasto declarations were checked
against those submitted in preceding years by a citizen or his immediate
ancestors. The very existence of this institutionalized and government-con-
trolled memory of families’ wealth enhanced the government’s ability to
intervene in the private affairs of its citizens. Thus, if the 1427 catasto was
an important step toward establishing, on the basis of criteria worked out
by a small group of clerks, the principle of fiscal equity in the city, it also
had ramifications of some consequence toward the fiscal and social control
of the urban populace, now required to divulge, under strict penalty, all
assets and liabilities.
Giuseppe Petralia has recently shown that a cazasto-like system of dis-
tributing onera was first applied in Pisa in 1416, at the time Florence was
40 Conti (1984).
devising new means of extending its direct control over its once proudly
independent neighbor. Samuel Cohn' current study of the Florentine
mountain communities reinforces Petralia’s finding and even extends it to
the years at the turn of the century. What's more, the extension of the cata-
sto to the entire territory had potentially far-reaching consequences for the
very political control of the territorial state. As-Petralia correctly suggests,
this policy “contributed to undermining local autonomy in the realm of
direct taxation by threatening the establishment of an unprecedented prac-
tice of routinely imposing direct taxes; and also interfered in the relation-
ship with the contadi by bypassing the dominant urban groups, thus under-
mining their predominance.”*! To their dismay, Volterra’s inhabitants dis-
covered the degree to which Florence would insist on applying the catasto
even to subject territories that until then had enjoyed considerable autono-
my.
The preceding summary runs the risk of presenting too sharp, even too
anachronistic, a picture, and of imputing too rigid and inflexible a political
design to the early fifteenth-century regime. Nor should the degree of
attempted centralization, accompanied and promoted by new government
agencies, necessarily lead to conclusions about the modernity or efficiency
of the Florentine state. A working hypothesis on the Florentine state’s
alleged modernity would require further discussion, both terminological
and empirical. Suffice it to point out the government’s persistent reluctance
to apply forms of direct taxation in the city and its attendant preference for
a fiscal policy based on distinctions between residents of Florence and
those of subject towns and territories. However hard the government may
have tried to integrate its recently acquired territorial state, differences in
fiscal treatment between capital and periphery, between citizens and sub-
jects, even between different locations within the contado or distretto, not
to speak of between affluent and indigent (expressed most clearly in the
exclusion of the value of private homes and of their furnishings from cata-
sto assessments), remained close to the core of its politics. Nor, shifting
attention to developments of an administrative sort, does one witness a con-
certed effort to plan ahead, to prepare projective budgets with which to
anticipate government incomes and expenses. And, as Brucker, Fubini, and
*! “Andava a ledere l'autonomia locale in materia di imposizione diretta, minacciando

l’instaurazione di una inedita prassi di prelievo diretto ordinario, e perché andava a inter-
ferire nella relazione con i contadi scavalcando i ceti urbani dominanti e incrinandone l’ege-
monia” (Petralia [1994]).
* Lorenzo Fabbri, “Autonomismo comunale ed egemonia fiorentina a Volterra tra ’300
e 400” (paper presented at a conference on the history of Volterra, October 1993).
Zorzi have pointed out in much of their work, these policies were them-
selves the often contested outcome of sharp clashes within the regime’s own
ranks, especially in the first decades of its existence.
Still, it might be possible to argue that, in Florence, during the last
decades of the fourteenth and the opening decades of the fifteenth cen-
turies, the conjuncture of war and military expenses did bear out, albeit
indirectly, the traditional ancient and medieval wisdom that wars, by gen-
erating a great need of money, strengthen states. When filtered through the
contemporary political balances, war and its attendant fiscal demands pro-
duced a centripetal movement from the margins of the territorial state
toward its core, loosening, and on occasion even breaking, some of the
many forces that contributed to making the late medieval Florentine state —
as nearly all contemporary states in Europe — a patchwork of more or less
ill-fitting components. i
That war and its attendant fiscal pressure need not necessarily result in
that outcome became evident following the change of regime. Important
recent studies have shown that, in the generations following 1434, power in
Florence was overwhelmingly exercised by personal influence, expressed
through political patronage, instrumental friendship, and marriage alliance.
Now, more often than not, crucial decisions on key policy issues were taken
in the shadows, in the privacy offered by the fortresslike walls of the Medici
Palace, or in the country estates of Medici lieutenants. William Kent, Dale
Kent, William Connell, Roberto Bizzocchi and Patrizia Salvadori have
shown that the charting of political relations in post-1434 Florence requires
the reconstruction, in their minutest details, of personal, private relations,
which, in turn, are traceable in the elaborate exchange of favors and the
scheming of great bosses, who shaped not only the public issues of their day
but the lives of their followers. However flawed and imperfectly applied by
its association with a specific regime, the republican ideology articulated
before 1434 exalted the equality of citizens before the law, the assumption
being that citizens should command other citizens only through the medi-
ation of the state’s institutions. Now increasing numbers of Florentines
found themselves dependent on other more powerful compatriots. Ties of
dependence became the norm, and, however elaborate the attempts of
some to dissimulate this translation of power, by the late 1470s Alamanno
Rinuccini could, with more than a trace of outrage, denounce the fact that
he and his compatriots were being driven round and round by the whims
of a young man. Of course, things did not change overnight. Patronage had
been exercised before 1434, and, as Nicolai Rubinstein has shown, repub-
lican institutions maintained a good deal of their superficial resilience even
after the Medici ascendancy.
But a change had taken place, and the new set of circumstances was all
too evident in the fate of one of the preceding regime’s impressive achieve-
ments: the catasto. Elio Conti has shown that, with the advent of the
Medici, the catasto was for all intents and purposes set aside, replaced by
older forms of distributing tax burdens. Tax commissions were once again
created, charged with estimating taxpayers’ assessments; liquid wealth was
excluded from taxation. The catasto had proved difficult to reconcile to the
material interests of the city’s wealthy families. Already in June 1434, dur-
ing the turbulent months preceding Cosimo de’ Medici’s recall from his
Venetian exile, an older form of distributio, the novina (assessed, as the
name suggests, by a commission of nine citizens, who would use their dis-
cretion to set individual tax rates), was approved by the legislative councils.
Symbolic, perhaps, of the change in fiscal regime is the very first enactment
of the plenipotentiary commission (balia) convened to recall Cosimo to Flo-
rence: the imposition of a rovina whose revenue would be used to pay
63,000 florins to Count Francesco Sforza.# No further recourse to the ca-
tasto would be made for the following twenty-three years. Only in moments
of great crisis, in 1457-58 and in 1480 following the Pazzi conspiracy, were
pale imitations of the 1427 catasto reintroduced, to be scuttled following
the crisis. Once again, therefore, the fiscal regime reverted to standards and
practices prevalent before 1427. As Conti observed, following the estab-
lishment of the Medicean regime, “one witnesses... the tendency... to con-
centrate in a few trusted hands the preparation of tax rolls, largely disman-
tling that system of formal guarantees that until then had been at the base
of the distribution of fiscal assessments.”# The case of Matteo Palmieri,
exemplarily studied by Conti, shows that influence peddling in the setting
of tax rates became rampant once again after 1434. However great the fis-
cal demands of war during the decades of the Medicean regime, the impe-
tus toward strengthening the government was interrupted, as new political
relations and a new political culture had now taken root.
Available knowledge of Florence’s fiscal relations with its territories is
even more scarce than that of many other topics. One has the impression
that the new regime in Florence — because of its own inclinations, and rein-
forced in this instance by the general decline of military costs in the second
half of the fifteenth century — allowed a considerable loosening of the grip,
fiscal and otherwise, placed on the territories in the first decades of the fif-
4 Balie 25, fol. 17r, September 29, 1434. On this method of distributing onxera, see Conti
(1984), 94-98; and Palmieri (1983), 74-75.
44 “Si assiste... alla tendenza... di accentrare in poche mani fidate la formazione dei ruoli
di imposta, smantellando in gran parte quel sistema di garanzie formali, che fino ad allora
avevano ispirato la ripartizione del coefficienti di imposta” (Conti [1984], 323).
teenth century. Furthermore, the fiscal burden seems to have been light-
ened. The most systematic study of this question, Judith Brown’s analysis of
Pescia, points in this direction, and so, it seems, do some of Petralia’s con-
cluding hypotheses about Pisa and Connell’s about Pistoia.? In the territo-
ries and subject towns as well, one discerns the functioning of those politi-
cal mechanisms that had been put in place by the Medici in Florence itself
— most important, the relations between patrons and clients, — the Medici
(but not they alone) discharging favors, the recipients often being the cities
or localities of the territorial state. Certainly, this impression is made by
Prato’s cultivation of close ties with the Medici, who mediated requests of
the Pratese government for fiscal and other favors with the government in
Florence.* The impression is reinforced by consideration of the treatment
afforded to subjects of provincial communities in their access to the Monte
delle doti. Letters and embassies sent by local governments in Arezzo and
San Gimignano to important local politicians — members of the Pitti and
Capponi families — requesting the right for their citizens to invest in the
Monte suggest that during the second half of the fifteenth century even
such important matters were mediated by personal ties, with a commensu-
rate erosion of the government’s power to regulate them without constant
reference to particular interests.*”
This very same trend — an unmistakable distancing from the centraliz-
ing administrative tendencies of the pre-Medicean regime — is also evident
in the registration of the state’s incomes and expenses. Lionardo Beccanu-
gi’s ambitious project in the Camera, continued for half a century by other
officials and their scribes, came to an end in 1433. In truth, the last volume
in this series compiled according to Beccanugi’s rigorous standards is for
the year 1432.# The volume for 1433, while still containing much useful
information, is marred by gaps, the outcome, perhaps, of the confusion and
upheaval of the year’s events. Starting in 1434, the volumes become largely
useless. More often than not, their pages are blank; they contain only occa-
sional and extremely fragmentary information. No comparable sets of
account books seem to have been initiated after 1434. The Monte’ bulky —
and, in their own way, admirable — account books begin only in the 1450s,
and they are largely confined to a registration of the Monte’s incomes and
expenses. True enough, by the 1450s an increasing fraction of the govern-
45 Brown J. (1982), ch. 4; Petralia (1994); Connell (1991).

46 Fasano (1986), II, 864-65.
47 Molho (1994), ch. 3.
48 Camera, Provveditori e Massai — Entrata e Uscita, 35, Archivio di Stato, Florence; see
also Molho (1971), app. B.
ment fiscal administration had passed over to the Monte (“pulsus... nostre
civitatis,” wrote a scribe in 1452),* and its master books contain as com-
plete an accounting as one could hope to find for the second half of the fif-
teenth century. But the point is that the Monte’s books are not as complete
as the preceding books of the Camera, for incomes not assigned to it were
simply not registered in its books. In this instance as well, one witnesses a
reliance on practices that had prevailed before innovations introduced dur-
ing the late fourteenth-century regime.
One detects the same movement (although more circuitous and com-
plex) in the management of the city’s public debt, whose protection had
remained every upper-class government’ goal since its founding in the
1340s. Prices of Monte credits in the secondary market remained high until
the mid-1420s, when they fell because of the acute military crises produced
by the Milanese and Lucchese wars. At the time of the first catasto’s redac-
tion in 1427, the discount prices of Monte comune credits hovered around
50 percent, where they remained for several years. By the mid-1430s, they
began to fall precipitously, losing more than half their value from the mid-
1430s to the late 1440s. Thereafter, for the balance of the century, they
remained at very low levels, occasionally but briefly rising to as high as 22-
24 percent of par, but more often than not being traded at 10-12 percent of
their face value. The loss of so much of their value, coupled with the steady
decline in thé rate of interest — by the century’s end the Monte promised a
rate of return of between 2 and 2.5 percent — meant that the government
had largely abandoned its hope of raising substantial sums of money
through the medium of broadly based forced loans, as it had done in the
preceding decades.” Instead, increasingly, a complex mechanism allowed
the government to raise funds by short-term borrowing from a small num-
ber of financiers, who also occupied positions of central importance in the
Medicean regime.
Recourse to a short-term, floating debt was not new in Florence. It had
been widely used in the crisis-laden late 1420s and early 1430s.? But, by the
middle of the century, short-term borrowing seems to have become the pre-
ferred option for raising cash. A network of bankers, who more often than
not also acted as officials of the Monte, could be counted on to advance
substantial sums against the incomes of indirect taxes that the government
expected to collect, and whose collection was often directly assigned to the
Monte, on whose board these bankers served. This “financial oligarchy,”
4° Balie, 52, fols. 53r-v, November 17, 1452.

20 For a discussion of these issues, see Molho (1994), ch. 2.
>! Molho (1994), chs. 6-7.
which, by the time of Lorenzo’s regime when it became highly visible, had
accumulated decades-long experience in this practice, represented an elite
within an elite, whose access to public resources was assured both in their
capacity as public officials and as creditors of the government.” The private
accounts of one of these financiers, Lorenzo di Matteo Morelli, show that
he advanced substantial sums to the government; that he was compensat-
ed with an annual rate of return of approximately 14 percent; and that he
himself raised a good deal of the capital for these loans by obtaining credit
from other bankers to whom he often paid annual interest of approximate-
ly 9 percent. If the profits he made in these transactions were not enor-
mous, they were, nonetheless, respectable; more important for our purpos-
es, through this practice he and his colleagues contributed to setting the
foundations for the creation in Florence of the sort of patrimonial state that
would clearly emerge at the time of Cosimo I. The interpenetration of pri-
vate and public interests — especially, as we noted, in the case of the Monte
delle doti — had been a staple of Florentine political tradition for genera-
tions. But while before an entire social class had been implicated in this
practice, now, increasingly, the perquisites of office were being reserved for
a restricted group, who could not help but end up by thinking that their
own interests were identical with those of the collectivity.
The risks of distortion are no less serious in this part of this discussion
than in the preceding one. Discontinuities between the two regimes have
been emphasized here, whereas a different analysis might well have dwelt
on continuities. Many of the “oligarchic” regime’s administrative changes
persisted in the centurys mid-decades and beyond: the magistracies, for
example, fashioned in the earlier period to control behavior considered to
be deviant or subversive. The cinque del contado also survived, although no
one, to my knowledge, has studied their records, and we do not really know
what policy their systematic study might reveal. Moreover, the Monte”
decline was consummated over a number of decades, and, arguably, much
fiscal policy during the 1440s and 1450s could be seen as aimed (although
one could not help but note the half-heartedness of the effort) at propping
up the gargantuan funded debt the earlier regime had bequeathed to its
successor. In the 1470s and 1480s, when the most perilous war since the
52 “Financial oligarchy” is Marks’s apt label (Marks [1960]).

3 The accounts of Morelli were very kindly brought to my attention by Leonida
Pandimiglio. I shall discuss this document (Carte Gherardi Piccolomini d’ Aragona, 166,
Archivio di Stato, Florence) in detail on another occasion. From September 15, 1483, to
May 13, 1385, Morelli advanced the government a total of more than 29,643 florins; from
August 31, 1486 to February 29, 1487-88 he was reimbursed for these sums and for interest
owed him.
1440s threatened the security of much of the territory, administrative inno-

vation was undertaken to ensure tighter control of the state’s peripheries.
But even here, this greater organizational energy appears aimed at ensuring
the presence of Florentine magistrates in the periphery through whom local
privileges and advantages is managed with an eye to protecting Flo-
rence’s own vital interests.’
Still, no one would ae that the political done had changed, as had
the “political style.” The Medicean regime’ political approach eroded
impersonal institutions precisely because its style could not easily coexist
with the types of garanzie formali the preceding regime had aspired to
enforce, especially in its fiscal policy. The point - more appropriately, a
hypothesis — is that following Cosimo’s access to power, despite the con-
siderable fiscal demands generated by almost continuous war in the
regime’s first two decades and then again from the 1470s on, fiscal policy
was conceived and applied to express the regime’s style of governance. In
the city, the regime’s fiscal policy was characterized by the exercise of per-
sonal influence in the determination of tax (or forced loan) assessments on
citizens; outside the capital there prevailed a variegated policy that differ-
entiated according to tradition and precedent. A seemingly careful avoid-
ance of impersonal and across-the-board criteria for distributing tax bur-
dens on subject towns and territories defined fiscal policy during the last
two-thirds of the fifteenth and the opening decades of the sixteenth cen-
turies. Where security interests were perceived as under danger, as, for
example, in the maintenance of fortifications in strategic locations, the gov-
ernment did not hesitate to intervene vigorously, seeking firm control of the
territories. Otherwise, and especially in the application of a fiscal regime, a
looser, less stringent, less centrally guided policy is clearly evident.
One further point bears raising here, even if only fleetingly. A number
of historians have remarked upon the modest tax revenues raised by the
government following the middle of the fifteenth century. Some scholars
have even suggested that the Florentine economy’s renewed vitality during
those decades should, at least in part, be imputed to this “lighter tax load,”
which obtained even in periods of acute military crisis, as in the 1470s and
1480s. The government failed to raise anywhere near the sums it had in the
1420s, when the city’s economy was more strapped for financial resources.
But even in periods of peace, when it did not have to contend with large
military outlays, and when the government was in dire need of funds with
which to shore up the ailing Monte and the nearly chronically cash poor
24 Connell (n. 45 above), 531-32.

» For the use of this expression, see Najemy (1991), 281.
Monte delle doti, it simply did not make much of an effort to tax its citi-
zens. One wonders why, especially since during the first two decades of the
century it had been able to raise such conspicuous sums. Might it be that
now the government was unable to marshal its citizens’ wealth precisely
because of the new political and ideological climate, which made it difficult
to generate the sort of commitment that had been possible in an earlier era?
Might it be that this lighter tax load was itself a sign of a government that
was conspicuously weaker during Lorenzo’s time than during the pre-
Medicean regime?
For all the obviously intrinsic interest that the history of public finances
in grand-ducal Tuscany might hold, the fact is that little is known about the
subject. And what little we do know deals more with normative aspects of
tax distribution and the organization of the fiscal administration than with
the ducal state’s revenues and expenditures. From the available evidence, it
would appear that the institutional structures on which the grand-duchy
erected its fiscal policy were’largely inherited from the preceding republi-
can era.* The nature of the new patrimonial state that emerged around the
figure of Cosimo I — with the duke’s policy of intermingling his private
commercial interests and a public role sufficiently noteworthy as to attract
the attention of foreign ambassadors — could be traced to traditions long
held in the republic. Throughout his career, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici
had tried to adhere to the dictum he formulated (however disingenuously)
to justify his acceptance of power following his father’s death: “I accepted
reluctantly, and only to protect friends and wealth, because without the
state one lives badly in Florence.”? Duke Cosimo seems to have shared that
sentiment, even if he reversed the order of activities: “a Firenze si può mal
governare senza le sostanze,” his continued and active commercial activities
seem to suggest.’ But the result was much the same, with the same confu-
sion of spheres that had prevailed earlier. And if members of the city’s rul-
ing classes had become accustomed to (indeed, had come to theorize the
importance of) drawing profit from the state, either by serving as govern-
ment officials or by investing in one of the government’s public funds, the
duke’s courtiers and officials showed no less acute an inclination to contin-
ue drawing profits from the state.
Furthermore, it appears that the duchy’s fiscal policy, in many of its
essential aspects, at least through the first half of the sixteenth century, rep-
56 Fasano (1973), 15-17, 78; Diaz (1976); Stumpo (1984).

57 “Mal volentieri accettai, e solo per conservazione degli amici e sostanze, perché a
Firenze si può mal vivere senza lo stato” (Diaz [1976], 146-48).
22 Diazi(197,6))
resented a continuation and adaptation of policies inherited from the

republican era — a process Elena Fasano Guarini has appropriately charac-
terized as a crystallization of previous, communal forms of governance.”
The extraordinary circumstances surrounding the duchy’s creation, the
immediately preceding wars and interventions of foreign powers, the dis-
crediting of the previous regime and its humiliating, if heroic downfall, the
successful wars against exiles and then against Siena did not give rise to new
fiscal systems. However new the stato nuovo may have been, and however
searing the circumstances surrounding its creation, in its fiscal structures it
was deeply anchored in the stato vecchio, just as its ruling class, as Fasano
Guarini and R. Burr Litchfield have shown, was a continuation of the
republic’s ruling class. No great innovations in fiscal structures are evi-
dent.
No new taxes were introduced by the new dukes; instead, they relied on
forms of taxation already devised in the preceding era. The decimza, a land
tax first instituted in 1495, continued to be assessed and collected through
the sixteenth century, although two points are perhaps worth making about
the ducal decima: that the land values established in the early sixteenth cen-
tury, at the time of the republican regime, remained unaltered for nearly a
century and that the same system of variegated application of the fiscal
laws, a characteristic of the second half of the fifteenth century, remained in
force through the sixteenth. The deczzzza was not applied on all cities and
territories; ecclesiastical lands, for example, were not subject to it, nor were
Livorno and Pisa. Fasano Guarini has remarked upon the “varieta del cri-
teri” applied in the calculation of the es¢imo assessed on the communities
of the distretto, while Petralia, when evaluating the mid-sixteenth-century
fiscal policy toward the territory, mused upon the “enduring sign of the
defeat consumated around the 1430s, in the culminating phase of the
republic’s expansion and consolidation.” As for the city, Diaz remarks
upon the “instruments, themselves not new”? used by Cosimo I for raising
money from his citizens, although one must admit that we lack any system-
atic studies of the fate of the Florentine Monti in the sixteenth century.”
One final point: much has been made of Cosimo I’s intensely personal
interest in governance, and the attention he devoted to examining and
5? Fasano (1973), 78.

Litchfield (1986).
‘1 “Traccia duratura della sconfitta maturata intorno agli anni trenta del Quattrocento,
nella fase culminante dell’espansione e aggregazione della repubblica” (Fasano [1973], 15-
16; Petralia [n. 41 above]).
9 “Strumenti, anch’essi non nuovi” (Diaz [1976], 151).
® But see now Menning (1993).
approving all sorts of petitions, decisions, and declarations. Yet it seems

clear that this interest and the ensuing intensely personal style were not
translated into a more efficient bookkeeping of the state’s accounts. To lis-
ten to the few historians who have studied this problem, the fragmentation
and outright disorganization of government accounts in the mid-sixteenth
century exceeded those of a century before. Despite Diaz’s observation
about “the princely government’s equalizing intervention in the matter of
catasti and taxes”, he cannot but marvel at the duke’s “carelessness and
lack of preparation in the area of expenses,” as a result of which “accounts
of incomes and expenses that are scattered through contemporary docu-
ments are always partial and approximate.” On this point at least, it would
be hard not to agree with Enrico Stumpo’s observation that “what is
increasingly missing...in the Medicean state’s fiscal structure is a central
organization, which might correspond to a central and unified vision of the
administration of the [state’s] incomes.”® A new regime had been born
because of the crises of the age. Neither its novelty nor the circumstances
surrounding its creation contributed to its greater efficiency, nor, certainly,
to the adoption of a new set of fiscal laws intended to strengthen the gov-
ernment’s central organisms.
At least one question has not been addressed in the preceding reflec-
tions. How can one characterize the differences between the Florentine
state at the turn of the fifteenth century and in the middle of the sixteenth?
What, if anything, had changed in this interval? Granted, it would be diffi-
cult to use the case of Florence to illustrate the emergence of a state of the
sort Chabod envisioned in the 1950s. From the perspective of much recent
study on the history of late medieval and early Italy, Cosimo T's stato nuovo
appears to have been less zpersonale, razionale, legalistico, burocratico,
livellatore than its antecedent of more than a century earlier. In fiscal mat-
ters, it had surrendered its claim to tax liquid wealth, as also any hope of
applying a universal tax system on all its territories, and its subjects (the
Church included). The early fifteenth-century policy of renewing fiscal rolls
at brief intervals so as to account for people’s changing economic fortunes
was abandoned. Even the decline of the Monte delle doti — through which
4 “Intervento agguagliatore del governo principesco in materia di catasti e tributi” (Diaz

[1976], 153, 160, 161).
6 “Disinvoltura e improntitudine in ordini di spesa,” as a result of which “i rendiconti
di entrate e spese che si trovano qua e là nel documenti dell’epoca sono sempre parziali e
approssimativi” (Diaz [1976]).
66 “Quello che viene a mancare... nella struttura fiscale dello stato mediceo è una orga-
nizzazione centrale, che risponda ad una visione centrale e unitaria della gestione delle
entrate” (Stumpo [1984], 224).
private interest was intertwined with the interest of the republic — was a
sign of the state’s more modest ambition, of its retreat from goals its lead-
ers had reached, for a short period of time, in the first half of the fifteenth
century. There is a good case to be made that from the early fifteenth to the
mid-sixteenth century, Florence, when studied through the prism of its fis-
cal history, had become a patrimonial state, endowed with a government
that was less /egalistico or livellatore than it had been before.”
Yet, however correct this view might be, it would probably be a mistake
to rest the argument here. The experience of the early fifteenth century had
left its own traces, evident for generations thereafter. Anyone who examines
the registers of the decima granducale cannot fail to be struck by the simi-
larities — in format, organization, and even content — between these vol-
umes and those of the earlier cazastz. It is impossible to avoid the impres-
sion that the introduction of the catasto — not only the 1427 decision to
undertake an enormous tax census but the very manner of registering and
filing individual tax returns as well — led to a lasting change in the manner
in which the state collected and maintained information on whose basis it
assessed taxes. The mid to late fifteenth-century account books of the
Monte also bear witness of the provveditori della Camera’s influence in
shaping the work of subsequent officials in charge of communal incomes
and expenses. The fact is that, even if they are less complete than the books
of the provveditori, the Monte account books are more systematic and com-
plete (in their recording of the Monte’s intake and expenses) than any gov-
ernment accounts before 1382. Traces of the previous regime had also left
their imprint here, shaping the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century
government apparatus. The same traces are evident in other areas of polit-
ical life: for example, in the judicial reorganization in 1502, which, as Zorzi
has shown, followed the lines of administrative reform undertaken in the
early fifteenth century. Although the political contexts within which indi-
vidual institutions functioned had changed, these institutions could survive
for decades, even centuries. Their survival ensured that they would endow
government agencies with jurisdiction and power unavailable but for the
preceding season of administrative reorganization and centralization. If the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed a trend toward a new “coherent
regional-wide system of power” and the emergence of “more stable power
structures... and more powerful centers”? (as Elena Fasano Guarini and
Giorgio Chittolini have suggested), it may be that, in a sense, “system” and
See Peter Partner’s comparable comments regarding Rome in Partner (1980), 62.
“Coerente sistema di potere di ambito regionale” (Chittolini [1979], 38-39).
® “Apparati di potere più stabili e... centri più forti” (Chittolini [1979]).
“power” were legacies bequeathed by a previous season of administrative

innovation made possible by political circumstances. Change in these cir-
cumstances ensured that administrative innovation inherited from the past
— even if agencies and authority created by that innovation had formally
survived — would now result in different political consequences. In the case
of Florence’s Tuscany from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries,
this meant that the central government’s power would be more modest and
reduced — both in the substance of its actual authority and in the range of
its ambition — than it had been in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries.
V. One might ask whether the preceding proposition can be tested for
other territorial states. Of course, it is easy to make links between new polit-
ical regimes and the adoption of stringent (or at least new) fiscal policies.
This happened in Genova, when, from 1315 to 1350, after Simon Boccane-
gra’s reforms, the government was able to amortize 68 percent of the pub-
lic debt, with all the fiscal consequences that such a drastic reduction of the
debt’s carrying charges was bound to have.’° A comparable departure from
past tradition could be argued for Bologna, when in 1447 the city surren-
dered to the pope, and the papal governors recognized the autonomy of the
Credito di tesoreria, the foundation of the city’s fiscal structure for the fol-
lowing several decades.’! One could argue the same case for Parma and Pia-
cenza with the establishment there of the Farnese szgvorta in 1545, which,
according to the most recent historian of its public finance, applied a fiscal
policy that systematically favored the Farnese holdings in central Italy over
those in the south.?? Perhaps the same case could finally be made for the
kingdom of Naples and the advent of the Aragonese dynasty, for the gen-
eral consensus now is that King Alfonso launched a major program intend-
ed to centralize and render more efficient the imposition and collection of
revenues. This, certainly, seems to be the point made by Mario Del Treppo,
the most recent historian of the kingdom’s economy and of its fifteenth-cen-
tury public finance.? More such examples could be identified in the histo-
ries of other late medieval and early modern Italian states, although the
lacunae in our knowledge of each of these states’ histories do not lead to
70 Gioffré (1982), 141-42.

71 I follow Carboni (1993), 73-83; and, more generally, Orlandelli (1969).
? Romani (1978).
3 Del Treppo (1986), 106-19. See also Ryder (1976), esp. ch. 6, entitled “Finance,” for a
set of even stronger claims for Alfonso” government; and Tabacco (1990), 48, for a gentle
reproof of these claims.
clear links between fiscal developments and political structures, at least not
of the sort made for Florence.
The case of Venice might merit an ever slightly more detailed consider-
ation here, because there is one moment in its history that could perhaps be
fruitfully examined from the perspective suggested in this article. The
regime that emerged in Venice following the dramatic events of the early
decades of the sixteenth century has often attracted the attention of histo-
rians. Dominated by a small number of old patrician families, the Venetian
governance of the mid-century, despite (or, perhaps, because of) an econo-
my adjusting to the profound changes in the contemporary economy and
two brief if intense periods of warfare with the Ottoman Turks, was sub-
jected to an increasing degree of discipline and streamlining.” In the words
of Gaetano Cozzi, following the prolonged and intense wars of the preced-
ing decades, the city was in need of an “organism that could effectively
place itself above other organisms, and result in a more expeditious and
effective internal and foreign policy.”” This organismo turned out to be the
Consiglio del Dieci, which together with the Zonta soon came to dominate
most aspects of Venetian administration. By the middle of the sixteenth
century, there was no aspect of governance that escaped the tentacular
extension of the Dieci’s power. Decisions that, until the 1530s, had been
made by the Senate were now made by this smaller and restricted magis-
tracy. And while an obviously oligarchic and secretive penchant defined
their procedures, one notes the systematic application of a policy to take
charge, to centralize operations of government, and to have other govern-
ment agencies account to the Dieci. Of course, they were responsible for
carrying on diplomatic negotiations, going so far as, twice in the span of a
few decades, to negotiate secretly the conclusion of war with the Turks.
They were also charged with overseeing the Serenissima’s military opera-
tions. Soon, too, they were supervising a series of other magistracies: the
Savi delle acque, the officio delle biave, even the ducal chancery, the organi-
zation of the territory. They created new offices, such as the esecutori della
bestemmia and the inquisitori contro la propalazione dei pubblici segreti.
And even though there seems to have been resistance to their ever widen-
ing authority, by 1570, when the second war against Turkey began, the
Dieci had carried out their program to produce a more centralized govern-
ment. There is no better sign of their enhanced position than the extension
# On the domination of the Venetian government by a few patrician families, see

Grendler (1991).
” “Organismo che... fosse in grado di collocarsi di fatto al di sopra degli altri organismi,
imprimere un corso più rapido e serrato alla politica interna ed estera” (Cozzi [1982], 146).
of their power to matters defining criteria for admitting new members to

the patriciate, and for waiving age requirements for membership in the
Maggior Consiglio. By 1571, the Dieci decreed that its own magistracies
would now wield jurisdiction in penal cases involving patricians.’° In short,
the regime that governed Venice during those decades was animated by a
precise and cohesive vision: centralize power, eliminate as much as possible
overlapping and contrasting jurisdictions, create a clear focus of political
and administrative authority.
One should set Venice’s fiscal history during those decades in the con-
text of the ambitious and overarching set of initiatives undertaken by the
Dieci. Given the growth of its jurisdiction, it was not surprising that the
Dieci took charge of fiscal matters as well. And under its jurisdiction, ini-
tiatives that tended toward the centralization and reorganization of fiscal
affairs were launched. A general reform of indirect taxes was begun in
1563, with the intent of ordering tariffs #7 modo stabile e unitario, while the
tariff rates for merchandise introduced from the Levant and from the Ter-
raferma were revised.” In 1566, despite the Senate’s active resistance, the
Dieci claimed authority to compile comprehensive annual budgets.’* Per-
haps the most striking element of this fiscal program was the determination
to reduce the size of the government’s large public debt. The Monte Nuovo,
funded in 1482, was paid off by 1552; starting in the next year, the Dieci set
aside fifty thousand ducats annually to amortize some of the other Montz.”
Even more remarkable among the regime’s fiscal initiatives was its decision
to extinguish the enormous debt accumulated during the second Turkish
war. Created following the authorization given by the Dieci to the Zecca to
accept interest-bearing deposits, by the war’s conclusion in 1573, this debt
amounted to approximately six million ducats. In the mid-1570s, the carry-
ing charges on all the government’s debts exceeded 700,000 ducats, an
enormous sum, more than one-third of the government’s total annual
intake.8° The situation had alarmed many contemporaries. Some feared
simply the government’s inability to gather the necessary resources with
which to pay these huge sums, especially if another emergency comparable
to the Turkish war were to present itself. Perhaps even more pertinently for
76 Cozzi (1982), 169.

77 Stella (1958), 2: 159; and Beltrami (1957), 2: 1075, n. 4.
78 Stella (1958), 2: 163.
7 Pezzolo (1990), 176.
80 On the details of the debt’s history immediately before the decision to extinguish it,
see Corti (1894); and Pezzolo (1990), 200-209, where there are references to other works on
this subject.
the argument presented here, in the words of Niccolò Contarini, a contem-

porary observer, such a huge debt undermined the authority of the govern-
ment because, unless things changed, “The commonweal, deprived of its
incomes, was entirely allowed to pass into private hands.”*! And Contarini
continued that such a state of affairs would result in a dangerous situation,
“because in the absence of the commune’s treasury, everything was admin-
istered to the better advantage of private interest.” In short, Contarini
seems to have perceived the existence of this enormous debt as a threat to
the political design the city’s ruling class had pursued over the preceding
several decades. Following a series of discussions whose sharpness, in tra-
ditional Venetian style, was greatly muted in public documents, within
seven years-from 1577 to 1584 — the government had extinguished this
debt, purchasing back the credits at par, and thus injecting as much as six
million ducats of cash in the Venetian economy.
This was a remarkable feat, an expression of the Dieci’s ability to take
and stick to a difficult decision, and also of the government’s capacity to
implement such an ambitious measure. Yet, whether directly related to this
set of events or not, the decision of the Dieci coincided with an important
turning point in the Serenissima’s political history. Between late 1582 and
spring 1583, the Dieci was stripped of much of its authority. Historians
have disagreed as to the significance of this event. Some consider it a mile-
stone in Venetian history, the rejection by the gzovani of the restrictively oli-
garchic and centralizing tendencies pursued by the vecchi since the centu-
ry’s early decades.® Others have pointed to the essential continuity of the
city’s ruling class, as the same families that led the Dieci before 1583 now
dominated the Senate’s affairs.** Someone who has not directly studied the
relevant Venetian sources has difficulty taking a clear position on this
important issue, especially since no one so far seems to have paid close
attention to the government’s policies following the drastic diminution of
the power of the Dieci. Yet it does seem fair to ask if the realignment of
power between the Dieci and the Senate might not have been related to the
policies pursued by the former, especially to the decision to extinguish the
8! “Il publico, spogliato delle entrate, tutto fusse lasciato passare nelle rendite private”
(Cozzi [1958], 312-13, where one finds the relevant text of Contarini’s Historiae Venetiane).
* “Dove non vi essendo più erario del commune, tutto come al particulare interesse tor-
nava meglio amministrato” (Cozzi [1958]).
® Cozzi (1982), esp. v and 173-74, where he quotes comments that Paolo Sarpi made to
Christoph von Dohna, twenty-five years after the fact, to the effect that in 1582-83 the
republic “cangiò governo.”
# Lowry (1971); Grendler (1991) appears to share Lowry’s view.
® This very point is made by Cozzi (1982), xv.
public debt. Historians who have written on this episode have generally
commented on its extraordinary character, on the Venetian government’s
ability — unprecedented in the annals of late medieval and early modern
Italy — to extinguish such a huge debt and, by so doing to add mightily to
the liquidity of the Venetian economy and to the city’s general prosperity.89
Yet there is a question that seems to require further discussion: those who
invested in the debt did not simply enjoy a very good return on their capi-
tal, which ranged from 8 to 14 percent a year; their return was enhanced by
the fact that interest on that investment was tax free. The extinction of the
debt may have injected a large sum of money into the Venetian economy; it
also enlarged the state’s tax basis, and substantially reduced the return
earned by a group of investors, whose number and identity, unfortunately,
are not known. The political ramifications of the Dieci’s extraordinary deci-
sion will be hard to assess so long as the social history of investment in the
public debt and the composition of the class of investors remain
unknown. The available facts do not enable one to pursue this point fur-
ther, especially since an even more basic issue — the nature and significance
of the 1582-83 events — are not better understood.
One needs to adduce more detailed evidence with which to test the
hypothesis presented above: that a centralizing penchant defined certain
regimes, which made systematic efforts — not in the fiscal realm alone — to
streamline and make the government’s authority more efficient; the fall or
weakening of such a regime brought an end to the season of centralization,
as opposing groups, animated by different views and attached to different
interests, now took over the governance of the state. So, the argument goes,
the history of these states is not marked by steady progress toward central-
ization, bureaucratization, and efficient administration, nor was the gov-
ernment’s predictable response to the chronic effects of war the increasing
centralization of authority in the central agencies of government. Rather,
seasons of centralization alternated with those of fragmentation; fluctua-
tions depended as much, if not more, on the state’s internal politics as on
external pressure generated by war. Of course, even the most far-reaching
plans for reorganization often exceeded their sponsors’ ambitions, and
there was a constant gap between proposals for centralization and their
implementation. Such gaps are evident everywhere, although, perhaps,
86 This is the dominant theme in Lane (1973), 325-26, and in several other essays Lane
has devoted to this subject.
# Pezzolo (1990), pp. 204-5, suggests that there was little opposition to the liquidation
of the debt because Venetian investors could apply their cash to the purchase of lands in the
Terraferma.
nowhere are they clearer than in Naples, even during the most ambitious
and sweeping reform efforts made by King Alfonso. “The tension
between... the tendency toward centralization, and the sociopolitical reali-
ty” noted by Aurelio Musi for the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-centu-
ry kingdom of Naples could just as easily be applied*to other Italian terri-
torial states.88 But while this observation helps one to understand the
fragility and brevity of centralizing initiatives, it does not lead to the link
which, it has here been proposed, emerges in a consideration of the history
of Florence.
The problem may well be just that: that the analysis in the preceding sec-
tion and the attendant hypothesis about the nexus between war, govern-
ment, and the state’s internal politics are based on the history of Florence,
in many respects an atypical territorial state. No other state — not even
Genova, notorious for its chronically unstable politics — underwent as
many changes in regime as Florence. However resilient the city’s ruling
class, and however pliable its members to changing political circumstances,
even if one undertakes a survey starting only with the mid-fourteenth cen-
tury, a number of moments — in 1343, 1348, 1378, 1382, 1433, 1434, 1494,
1498, 1512, 1527, 1531 — produced major political reorientation. It is
unlikely that such volatility over so long a period of time could be matched
by other major Italian territorial states. Equally unlikely, therefore, might be
the suggestion that the hypothesis presented above is applicable to other
territorial states. What is more, for reasons that need not detain us here, the
history of Florence has been explored in much greater detail than have the
histories of many other Italian states. Not even Genova and Venice —
republican regimes that relied heavily on public debts, left behind massive
archives with which to illuminate their distant pasts, and therefore could
serve as convenient points of comparison — have been explored with any-
where near the intensity evident for generations in the work of students of
Florence’s past. The key element of our hypothesis concerns a territorial
state’s internal politics, the composition and interests of its dominant class;
one can think of these as metaphorical filters through which pressures of
funding the costs of war were translated into administrative change and fis-
cal policy. The absence of systematic research and the resultant fuzziness of
other territorial states’ internal histories make it difficult to draw contrasts
and comparisons with Florence. Finally, it is clear that even if one had the
most detailed and thorough accounts of these issues — for Genova, Venice,
# “Dialettica di incontri e scontri, di coincidenze e scarti tra il progetto assolutista di

mantenere libera e organizzare in modo indipendente la sfera della direzione statale, la ten-
»
denza all’accentramento, e la realtà politico sociale” (Musi [1979], 205).
or any other late medieval Italian state — the variety of political experience
in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy — the different political trajecto-
ries followed by territorial states as different from each other as Milan was
from Florence, and either Venice or Genova from Naples, and any of these
from Ferrara, Lucca, or Perugia — would often make precise comparisons
not only difficult, but even contrived and unnecessary.
Yet, as Tabacco recently suggested, by the fifteenth century a number of
common elements emerged in the disparate histories of the Italian states.
One of these, he argued, was “the increasing distancing of the official
power structures from society’s processes.”5° The Quattrocento, he contin-
ued, was at once a period of transition, in a long process of “progressive
statal construction” and a “more or less conscious search for equilibria in a
pluralistic society.” Even if the adjective progressiva might require more
precise definition, Tabacco” reflection fully captures a defining trait in the
politics and society of late medieval Florence. The tension of centripetal
and centrifugal tendencies in the organization and administration of the
state is evident in Florence’s history, and I hope that it emerges clearly in
the outline, however schematic, presented in this article. Other scholars
more familiar than I am with the histories of other Italian regions must
decide if the hypothesis developed in reference to the history of Florence
might also apply outside of Tuscany. The end result of such a comparison
might be the discovery of yet another small piece of that wider mosaic of
common Italian experience evoked by Tabacco.
VI. Having started this article by referring to Niccolo Machiavelli’s

insight that, contrary to the common wisdom of his day, “i danari non sono
il nervo della guerra,” it might be appropriate to close by returning to his
reflection. A variant of his aphorism might be that public finance was not
the ingredient indispensable to the centralization and strengthening of
states. Instead, politics offers a more useful vantage point from which to
examine the link between government and public finance in late medieval
and early modern Italy. Institutional parallels in the realm of public finance
— be these public debts, diversity of fiscal regimes in the capital city and the
territory, and heavy reliance on indirect taxes — and even each govern-
ment’s need for great treasure with which to fight the nearly endemic war-
fare of the period did not have the same consequences as regards the histo-
89 “La separazione crescente dell’apparato ufficiale del potere dalle dinamiche della soci-
eta” (Tabacco [1990], 49).
% “Progressiva costruzione statale” and a “ricerca più o meno consapevole di equilibri
in una società pluralistica” (Tabacco [1990]).
ry of states. Galasso’s characterization of the “storia italiana preunitaria” as

“a multiplicity of urban, regional, and interregional histories, which at once
run parallel to and intersect each other”?! seems entirely applicable to the
fiscal sphere as well. This multiplicity of histories, at the very least as
regards the nexus between the state and public finance, would seem easier
to account for by referring to political experience and to the histories of
regimes. Thus, it is clear that the existence of public debts in Florence,
Genova, and Venice does not shed much light on the nature of each of these
three territorial states. Rather, their natures and the different histories of the
public debts themselves can be better understood by keeping in mind their
political processes as well as the balance of their political forces. This, at
least, is the hypothesis drawn from the Florentine experience. To what
degree might it be helpful in explaining the history of other territorial
states? If it was thought to be helpful, might it then be necessary to devote
considerably more attention than has been done recently to the study of
political history, to the tensions, clashes, and political balances that define
their histories, and to the political culture, or style, of their governing class-
es? This work would appear to be the indispensable filter through which to
examine the history of late medieval and early modern public finance of the
Italian territorial states.
2 Galasso (1974), 83.

9.
SOCIETÀ E FISCO NELLINTERPRETAZIONE
DI ELIO CONTI
Il 13 maggio 1952, Gaetano Salvemini scrisse a Frederick Lane, che si

trovava a Parigi come rappresentante della Rocketeller Foundation.in
Europa, chiedendo se la ben nota fondazione americana finanziava anche
ricerche di studiosi europei: Inizio le mie osservazioni con una citazione
piuttosto lunga da questa, mi sembra sconosciuta, lettera:
I do not know whether the Rockefeller Foundation helps European scholars.
If so, I take the liberty of warmly recommending to you a young man, for whom I
have great respect, Dr. Elio Conti; Via Falcucci, 62, Florence.
He has been working for more than one year on an unexplored and pioneering
field of Florentine social history: the passage from the commercial and banking ari-
stocracy of the XIVth Century to the landowning ruling class of the XVIth and fol-
lowing centuries. He has found in the Archive of Florence the documents of the
income tax for all families during the XVth century. For each family one sees how
and when it goes bankrupt, when trading and banking is given up and land is
bought, etc. and this for the whole century!
Dr. Conti has already done a splendid job. I have been able to procure him money
enough to live for one year. But he still needs another year and a half of labor. And
I do not know how to help him to solve this problem.
Would it be possible for the Rockefeller Foundation to help him through a grant
in aid of one thousand dollars? This will allow my young — intelligent and hard-
working, but penniless man — to overcome all difficulties, and to bring to its end a
splendid investigation on the economic, social and political history of Italian
Renaissance.!
! Rockefeller Foundation Archives, R.G. 1.1., series 751s, University of Florence — Conti —
Box R1140 (Unprocessed Material).
Tutto il materiale citato nelle pagine successive che riguarda la storia dei rapporti tra
Conti e la Fondazione Rockefeller proviene da questo fondo. Ringrazio Thomas Rosen-
baum, archivista della Rockefeller Foundation, per l’aiuto offertomi nel corso di questo pro-
Questa bella lettera salveminiana ci offre la possibilità di inquadrare il

grandioso progetto di ricerca di Elio Conti così come fu concepito intorno
al 1950. E le circostanze che circondano l’assegnazione della borsa Rocke-
feller, alle quali ritornerò fra poco, ci assistono ulteriormente nel capire il
contesto e le circostanze intorno al lavoro di Conti al momento — o quasi —
del suo avvio. .
Questo ritorno alla genesi del progetto contiano è necessario perché solo
risalendo alle origini mi sembra possibile risolvere un’aporia che mi si pre-
sentò sin dall’inizio della mia riflessione sul lavoro di Conti. Francamente,
nell’affrontare il tema assegnatomi per questo incontro, mi sono trovato in
una certa difficoltà. Il titolo della mia relazione, come appare nel program-
ma, è “Elio Conti e gli studi sul fisco.” E ovvio che ci sia un presupposto in
questo titolo, alla formulazione del quale, aggiungo subito, detti a suo
tempo il mio consenso. Il titolo della relazione suggerisce che, almeno per
una parte del suo lavoro scientifico, Conti possa essere considerato uno sto-
rico della fiscalità, nello stesso modo e per i motivi che ci ha esposto Gio-
vanni Cherubini, dobbiamo anche considerarlo storico delle campagne e
dell'agricoltura medievale e moderna. In fin dei conti, due dei sei volumi
scritti o curati da Conti su argomenti medievali si riferiscono alla storia
delle finanze pubbliche fiorentine. Di qui il passo sarebbe breve, da Conti
e gli studi sul fisco, a Conti storico della fiscalità.
Ma il problema che ho dovuto risolvere è emerso quando mi son reso

conto che Conti non fu in senso stretto (e credo che neanche lui si consi-
derasse) uno storico della fiscalità. In un certo momento, nel corso del suo
lavoro, ha dovuto occuparsi di problemi della finanza pubblica, e lo ha
fatto, come è ovvio, con grande maestria e sicurezza, difficilmente uguglia-
te da storici che, negli ultimi cento anni, si sono occupati della fiscalità degli
stati italiani nel medioevo. Ma mentre nei casi di studiosi come Bernardino
Barbadoro e Marvin Becker per Firenze, Gino Luzzatto e Frederic Lane
per Venezia, Gino Barbieri per Milano, Jacques Heers e prima di lui Hein-
rich Sieveking per Genova, e William Bowsky per Siena (cito qui solo quel-
li che hanno dedicato al problema monografie corpose, e non mi soffermo
su David Herlihy e Cinzio Violante, autori di suggestivi ma programmatici
getto. Nelle seguenti pagine mi limito alle note essenziali di precisi riferimenti bibliografici,
evitanto l'aggiunta di riferimenti a ben noti lavori di Elio Conti stesso e di altri storici con-
temporanei. Colgo questa occasione per ringraziare Roberto Vivarelli per aver discusso con
me i suoi ricordi di Elio Conti, e Gene Brucker e Lauro Martines per aver gentilmente rispo-
sto ai miei quesiti sui loro rapporti con Conti negli anni Cinquanta.
9. SOCIETÀ E FISCO NELLINTERPRETAZIONE DI ELIO CONTI 205
articoli piuttosto che di trattamenti sistematici) mi sembra chiaro che la

méta del loro lavoro fosse quella di scoprire e analizzare meccanismi fisca-
li, a volte il rapporto tra questi e lo stato, oppure l’intreccio tra classi diri-
genti e strutture fiscali, tutto ciò su un doppio fondo teorico più o meno
esplicitamente articolato: da una parte i rapporti tra economia, politica e
fiscalità, dall’altra una comparazione tra i casi specifici trattati dall’autore
ed altri simili emersi nella storia fiscale di regioni e periodi diversi. Nel caso
di Elio Conti la fiscalità fu vista sopratutto come mezzo per esplorare un
territorio enormemente più complesso e difficile: la società fiorentina.
Una conferma indiretta di questa ipotesi si trova nelle premesse dei due
volumi sulla fiscalità. Sono premesse che, se confrontate con quelle ante-
poste ai volumi sulle campagne, e anche tenuto conto che per Conti questi
volumi erano supporti di una ricerca più vasta ed articolata, colpiscono per
il modo in cui si concentrano su un’ottica che rimane volutamente interna
alla realtà fiorentina e toscana, ed evita di fare riferimento ai grandi pro-
blemi della storiografia fiscale che hanno appassionato molti storici dalla
fine del secolo scorso. Questa mancanza di riferimenti esterni, e questa
esclusiva attenzione alle cose fiorentine non dipendevano certo da una
mancata conoscenza di questi aspetti da parte di Conti, che era invece buon
conoscitore della materia e del dibattito storiografico su di essa. Essa dipen-
deva evidentemente da una sua precisa intenzione. Il motivo per cui Conti
ritenne certi argomenti degni di discussione, mentre sorvolò su altri, va
ricercato nell’evoluzione del punto di vista che alimento per oltre trent’an-
ni il suo ambizioso progetto di ricerca.
Torniamo allora, brevemente, alla corrispondenza Salvemini-Lane, e alle

circostanze intorno alla borsa Rockefeller. Non credo che sia il caso di rico-
struire in tutti i suoi dettagli la piccola cronaca degli scambi epistolari che
finì con l’assegnazione della borsa Rockefeller a Conti. Mi sembra comun-
que importante soffermarci su pochi punti di questa ricostruzione, non solo
perché ci rivelano i rapporti scientifici ed umani di una piccola cerchia di
grandi storici e maestri, ma anche perché attraverso questi dati possiamo
avviare la nostra ricostruzione dell’iter scientifico intrapreso da Conti nei
primi anni Cinquanta. Per la storia della borsa Rockefeller, oltre Salvemini
e Conti, protagonisti furono Lane, e Raymond de Roover. Inizialmente
molto cauto sulla possibilità di questo finanziamento, Lane, comunque,
cercò di appurare se il progetto Conti come descritto da Salvemini, fosse
eleggibile per un finanziamento, dato che, in quegli anni, la fondazione era
interessata a ricerche di storia economica, e di quella contemporanea. L'in-
tervento risolutivo fu offerto da Raymond de Roover, il quale, in un lungo
colloquio con Lane (descritto da quest’ultimo nel suo diario, sotto la data
19 luglio 1952) insistette sull'opportunità di finanziare “l’assistente di Sal-
vemini.” De Roover descrisse il progetto Conti come ricerca di base sulla

struttura sociale della Firenze quattrocentesca, ed offrì di pagare egli stesso
i costi di un viaggio di Conti a Parigi, perché quest'ultimo potesse esporre
a Lane la natura del suo progetto.? Il viaggio si avverò circa tre settimane
dopo, e nel suo diario Lane annotò che la ricerca di Conti, che gli pareva
molto importante, avrebbe offerto “una elevatissima possibilità di capire lo
sviluppo sociale, economico e demografico del 15° secolo.” Ma, in una nota
tristemente profetica, sotto la data di 11 agosto 1952, aggiunse: “Egli [cioè
Conti] pensa che, dedicando il suo tempo ininterrottamente a questa ricer-
ca, potrebbe pubblicare i risultati in due anni, di cui un anno e mezzo
sarebbero necessari alla schedatura dei dati, un’attività alla quale si dedica,
ormai da due anni, ma non a tempo pieno. Gli dissi che sottovaluta il tempo
che gli servirà per sintetizzare i suoi risultati.”? Anche con questa riserva
mentale, Lane insistette con i suoi colleghi della fondazione, e il 19 settem-
bre in tono molto compiaciuto poté scrivere a Salvemini della decisione di
offrire a Conti una borsa per due anni. La decisione formale fu approvata
a New York poco più di un mese dopo, il 27 ottobre, con la giustificazione
che “la ricerca del Dott. Conti ha un valore potenzialmente alto per la com-
prensione degli sviluppi sociali, economici e demografici nel quindicesimo
? Estratti del diario di Lane si trovano nella stessa scatola della Rockefeller Foundation
dove è collocato (senza una numerazione interna) tutto il materiale Conti. Scrisse Lane:
“Although we spent most of the evening in personal chit-chat, RR urged vigorously that RF
help Salvemint’s assistant, Conti, to finish his study of the fifteenth century Florentine tax
records, saying it would only require $500-$600, and that he (RR) would pay personally the
cost of Conti’s coming to see me if that was neecessary. RR urged it as social science, since it
is really basic research into the social structure of fifteenth-century Florence.”
> Estratto dal diario Lane, sotto data 11 agosto 1952: “EC showed me samples of the
notes and compilations he is making, working through the Catasti of the Florentine Repu-
blic. See his memo in Paris files. [Non è stato possibile rintracciare questo scritto che Conti
avrà mandato a Lane prima del viaggio parigino.] He persuaded me of the reliability of the
basic data by explaining at what point politics entered into making the assessment. His study
has a very high potential value for understanding of the social, economic, and demographic
development in the fifteenth century... EC’s desperate financial outlook has been relieved by
the... [Biblioteca Feltrinelli], for he received from them on August 8 an offer to pay him
1,080,000 lire over 3 years (30,000 a month) for agreeing to let them publish his book... With
30,000 lire a month EC and his sister can work in the archives as long as they are open, and
then earn another 30,000 in the afternoon and evenings, thus getting the 60,000 lire a month
which he says he needs. He thinks that if he had full time for his study he could publish it
in 2 years, but 1 1/2 years thereof would be spent in collecting the material, which he has
already been doing, part-time, for 2 years. As I told him, he underestimates how long it will
take to synthesize his results.”
* “I am very happy to tell you that the officers of the Division of Social Sciences have
approved in principle a grant in aid up to a total of 900,000 Lire in support of Elio Conti’s
research over a period of two years...”.
secolo. Se necessario, [saremo] preparati a considerare un finanziamento

anche per un terzo anno.”
Già un mese prima, avvisato senz’altro da Salvemini, Conti scriveva per

ringraziare Lane per la buona notizia “e per la fiducia nei miei confronti.
Certamente non la deluderò. Ora mi sento tranquillo perché sono libero da
problemi economici. Negli ultimi due giorni abbiamo avuto qui a Firenze
un congresso internazionale di studi rinascimentali. Il punto emerso più
chiaramente nelle discussioni riguarda la necessità di sapere di più sull’am-
biente sociale all’interno del quale emerse la società del Rinascimento.”°
Sono chiare, anche in una lettera breve e di mera formalità, le categorie por-
tanti del progetto contiano: ambiente sociale e società. Sono termini fonda-
mentali per Conti e ne ritorneremo fra poco.
Dall’ Archivio Rockefeller manca la domanda per la borsa che Conti

dovette presentare in quei giorni. Fortunatamente, una parte importante di
questo documento fu edito da Guido Pampaloni, nel suo commosso necro-
logio dedicato all’amico nelle pagine dell’ Archivio storico italiano.” Questo
documento, redatto immagino intorno alla fine dell’estate del 1952, illumi-
na, in modo insolitamente chiaro, le intenzioni di Conti. Dai passi pubbli-
cati da Pampaloni emergono due punti importanti. Spiegando il suo appro-
do al suo attuale progetto di ricerca, Conti scrive: “Ottenuta la laurea mi
dedicai a una branca di studi poco coltivata in Italia, quelli sulle classi socia-
li e la struttura della società. Le prime ricerche e letture si orientarono verso
la fine del medioevo e il Rinascimento, periodi che, oltre a suscitare un inte-
resse non soltanto italiano ma europeo, rappresentano la base di partenza
per la moderna società italiana.” Tre volte, nell'arco di queste due frasi,
Conti ripeté la parola chiave della sua ricerca: società. E una parola chiave
non solo per il suo progetto, ma per iniziative culturali di grande respiro
che si stavano formulando, proprio in quegli anni, a Firenze e che come
vedremo coincidevano largamente con l'orientamento che Conti si stava
costruendo. Ma oltre la parola società, Conti offre un’altra chiara chiave di
lettura del suo progetto. La decisione di non continuare con gli studi di sto-
ria post-risorgimentale, alla quale non accenna nel suo esposto — almeno nei
>“ The DSS [Division of Social Sciences] officers feel that Dr. Conti’s study has high
potential value as a contribution to the understanding of social, economic and demographic
developments in the fifteentn century and they are prepared to consider support for a third
year, should this prove necessary.”
6 Purtroppo, il fascicolo Conti nell'Archivio Rockefeller è incompleto. Questa lettera si
trova solo nella traduzione preparata da Lane stesso, dalla quale l’ho ritradotto in italiano.
7 Pampaloni (1990).
brani del documento che io conosco — che non può non colpire chi sia al
corrente della sua biografia scientifica, andrebbe vista non come un abban-
dono del suo interesse per la storia contemporanea, non un allontanamen-
to dai problemi della sua, attuale società, ma piuttosto come una ridefini-
zione di un profondo e duraturo interesse. Lo studio del medioevo rappre-
senta non un rifugio, ma una continuazione, per percorsi diversi, verso la
comprensione del mondo attuale. Conti asserisce di voler studiare, è bene
ripeterlo, “la base di partenza per la moderna società italiana,” che poi sarà
quel passaggio al quale accennava Salvemini nella sua prima lettera a Lane,
“dall’aristocrazia commerciale e bancaria del 14° secolo, alla classe dirigen-
te terriera del 16°, e dei secoli successivi.”
Prima di esaminare più attentamente il significato di questo passo, vor-

rei soffermarmi anche sul secondo brano del documento edito da Pampa-
loni. Base della sua indagine sarebbe l’archivio del catasto, che Conti
descrisse minuziosamente, cercando di far capire agli ufficiali della Rocke-
feller la straordinaria ricchezza dei suoi contenuti. La prima frase di questa
sezione del documento inizia così: “Il primo catasto, istituito sotto la pres-
sione delle classi inferiori per una distribuzione delle imposte proporziona-
le alla ricchezza, mobile e immobile, di ogni contribuente, risale al 1427.”
Segue una lunga e dettagliata descrizione delle modalità per la compilazio-
ne delle portate del catasto di quell’anno. Se questa frase — anzi, tutta la
sezione del documento - rivela il metodo rigorosamente empirico di Conti,
il suo attaccamento alla documentazione inedita ed una riluttanza ad allon-
tanarsi dalle fonti documentarie, secondo me rivela anche una sua propen-
sione a basarsi su espressioni generalizzanti che provenivano da una visio-
ne sociologica assai diffusa nell’Italia del dopoguerra. Ho in mente quel
riferimento alle “classi inferiori,” che, secondo la formulazione contiana,
sarebbero responsabili per la pressione che sfociò nell’istituzione del cata-
sto. Sin dal suo inizio, cioè, la visione del proprio progetto nutrita da Elio
Conti poggiava su due colonne metodologiche portanti: una, che potremo
denominare empirica, e l’altra, sociologica. Le due erano strettamente lega-
te tra di loro, anzi si potrebbe dire che ognuna era necessaria per l’altra,
perché mentre la visione sociologica serviva per disciplinare e interpretare
i dati d’archivio, i contenuti dei documenti servivano a loro volta a dare
concretezza e specificità alle categorie sociologiche. Era l'approccio della
ricerca del suo primo libro, Le origini del socialismo a Firenze, stampato nel
1950, e basato sulla sua tesi di laurea, discussa l’anno precedente. La
paziente raccolta di dati da archivi pubblici e privati aveva caratterizzato
quel primo, giovanile, lavoro, e gli stessi raggruppamenti sociali — piuttosto,
categorie sociali che portavano gli stessi nomi — erano identificati come pro-
tagonisti, sia nel 19° che nel 15° secolo. Mentre le classi inferiori furono
responsabili per l’introduzione del catasto nel 1427, nella metà del 19°
secolo “le ragioni della scarsa fortuna del radicalismo in Italia vanno ricer-
cate nella struttura sociale della penisola, nell’intima debolezza e nell’insuf-
ficiente coscienza di classe della piccola borghesia.”®
Al momento dell’avvio del suo progetto, il lavoro di Conti mi sembra
caratterizzato da tre filoni fondamentali, che complessivamente definivano
il suo approccio storico e che inquadravano i problemi storici che lo inte-
ressavano: la ricerca su Firenze incideva sulla comprensione del mondo
moderno, anzi ne scopriva le origini e le radici; inoltre, la ricerca andava
condotta su basi rigorosamente empiriche, tratte da fonti fiscali, che si spe-
rava avrebbero offerto una visione capillare e realistica della società fioren-
tina; infine, la ricerca era animata da una visione organica della società,
basata su teorie sociologiche vagamente marxiste e gramsciane, ma con una
venatura di non secondaria importanza di categorie weberiane. La mia
conoscenza dell'ambiente culturale e politico dell’Italia nell’immediato
dopoguerra non è molto approfondita e esiterei a presentare ipotesi com-
plesse sulla formazione scientifica di Elio Conti. Ma il problema di un suo
inquadramento nell’ambiente nel quale si formò, e dal quale colse stimoli
scientifici difficilmente trascurabili mi sembra importante, e nelle pagine
che seguono azzarderò qualche ipotesi di lavoro.
Mi sembra di poter identificare quattro fonti che incisero sulla forma-

zione del metodo storico di Elio Conti: l'insegnamento del suo maestro,
Carlo Morandi; l'influenza personale, ed innegabile, anche se difficilmente
rintracciabile su un concreto piano scientifico, di Gaetano Salvemini; il
dinamismo e fermento culturale della vita intellettuale a Firenze nell’imme-
diato dopoguerra, caratteristiche ampiamente diffuse in molti ambienti e
che sono chiaramente colte nella pagine di Soczetà, una rivista di grande
importanza in quegli anni; infine, una lunga tradizione caratteristica sen-
z altro della storiografia italiana sin dai tempi di Muratori, ma particolar-
mente florida in Toscana, di un grande rispetto per le fonti archivistiche, e
una riluttanza di allontanarvisi nella formulazione di qualsiasi generalizza-
zione sul passato.
Di Carlo Morandi mi sembra ci sia ancora molto da dire, anche dopo le

belle pagine scritte su Be//agor in anni non molto lontani da Ernesto Ragio-
nieri.? La sua influenza sui suoi allievi dovrà essere stata considerevole, per
il suo esempio di persona simultaneamente schietta ed aperta ad influenze
sono 1950)352:
° Ragionieri (1975).
intellettuali diverse e lontane. Se non altro, Morandi apriva per i suoi sco-
lari una finestra sul mondo della storiografia francese, e sugli studi di storia
sociale (particolarmente sulla storia delle campagne) avviati da Bloch e Feb-
vre. All’indomani della sua morte prematura nel 1950, Ragionieri evocava
la figura del maestro con parole che mi sembra siano adatte anche per
approfondire il nostro argomento. Scriveva Ragionieri:
avvinti come eravamo dai fantasmi di generici messaggi di redenzione, restammo
stupiti di quest'uomo calmo e sicuro, che discuteva e vagliava criticamente tutto,
che non si arrestava di fronte a nessun ostacolo, ma che sottoponeva ogni proble-
ma alla sua critica equilibrata e serena... C’è stata tutta una generazione di giova-
ni dell Ateneo fiorentino, che, senza condividere alla lettera i risultati della sua
indagine storiografica né approvare punto per punto le affermazioni cui egli arri-
vava nelle conversazioni private... ha risentito profondamente dell’influenza e del-
l’insegnamento del Morandi, ne ha appreso lo spirito informatore esatto, rigoro-
so, preciso, il disdegno per le ipotesi avventate e per le costruzioni fantastiche, il
gusto, che egli ci trasmetteva quasi inavvertitamente, per la discrezione e la sicu-
rezza di linee.
E continuava l’alunno, rievocando la figura del maestro in toni che non
possono che colpire chi abbia conosciuto Elio Conti, e apprezzato il suo
stile pacato e rigoroso, quella qualità mentale che, in paesi anglofoni si suol
chiamare understatement, e in italiano, se non sbaglio, è spesso chiamato
carattere signorile:
C'era indubbiamente in questo atteggiamento del Morandi una precisa coscienza
del fallimento, scientifico e morale, dei maestri-profeti, che, dopo aver proclamato
dalla cattedra le loro dottrine, le avevano clamorosamente smentite e tradite, ma
era una polemica tacita e discreta che si rivelava esclusivamente in un diverso meto-
do di ricerca e di impostazione del lavoro...Nella sua signorile riservatezza, Carlo
Morandi aveva inteso più profondamente di tanti altri che il problema delle giova-
ni generazioni che affluivano verso gli studi storici ed il suo insegnamento era
innanzi tutto un problema di disciplina, di ordine e di chiarezza mentale, necessità
di una visione magari dura e sconcertante, ma realistica della vita presente.!°
Sono parole che fanno eco allo sgomento sentito da Morandi stesso,
quando, esattamente vent'anni prima, nel 1930, rievocava la figura del suo
maestro, Antonio Anzilotti, morto anche lui giovanissimo. Scriveva Moran-
di, adoperando espressioni poi riprese dal suo allievo per evocare la sua
figura: “Aveva dinanzi a sé, a Pavia, dei giovani nei quali l’eco vivace delle
lotte politiche, fuori delle chiuse aule, faceva sorgere più forte il desiderio
d’una storia politica che attraverso il passato fosse luce e segno animatore
del presente. Ma eravamo anche giovani ansiosi di una visione realistica
!0 Ragionieri (1950).
delle cose, magari dura e sconcertante, d’un addestramento al lavoro minu-

to che ci togliesse dal ricadere nelle vuote generalità.”!!
Queste qualità personali e morali di Morandi, che poi sembrano aver

lasciato la stessa impronta su altri che lo conobbero e lo frequentarono —
penso a Sestan, Maturi, Saitta — devono aver trovato un riscontro nella per-
sonalità di Elio Conti, il quale avrà trovato lo stile personale e professiona-
le del maestro non lontano dalle proprie preferenze e gusti. In più, quei
consigli accorati ai “giovani” e loro atteggiamento verso la storia, scritti da
Morandi nel 1942, poco prima che Conti approdasse all’Università, espri-
mevano un atteggiamento verso lo studio della storia che mi sembra molto
vicino a quello che poi si sarebbe rivelato l'approccio applicato al lavoro
proprio da Conti. Osservava Morandi in quell’occasione che “i migliori
[cioè, giovani] leggono molto, ma poi circoscrivono la propria attività ad un
campo ben delimitato, ad un’età, ad un periodo, ad una serie di problemi.
Infine, nessuno più rifugge dalle indagini d'archivio...” !°
Mi sembra che oltre questo livello di stile, 0, se si vuole, di un atteggia-

mento mentale, sia possibile cogliere l’influenza di Morandi anche su un
altro livello, questo più propriamente scientifico. Ho in mente l’interesse di
Morandi per la storia della cultura, e quella sua propensione a estendersi
non solo nei campi della storia diplomatica e politica, ma anche ad interes-
sarsi ad approcci di storia culturale — a quell’elegiaca e triste interpretazio-
ne del tardo medieovo europeo di Johan Huizinga, alle letture sul rinasci-
mento, anche ad un suo piano riferito da Ragionieri nel suo ritratto del
1975, proprio nell’anno finale della sua vita, di insegnare un seminario sulla
vita sociale in Italia nei tempi del rinascimento. Mi domando, cioè, se quel-
l’attenzione di Conti alle manifestazioni della vita culturale dell’Italia tardo
medievale non fosse stimolata ed incoraggiata da Morandi, e dalla sua
ampia, e versatile visione storica.!
Parlare dei rapporti Conti-Salvemini mi sembra simultaneamente facile

e difficile: facile, perché, come già abbondatemente constatato, fu Salvemi-
ni ad aiutare il suo assistente, a cercargli borse di studio — non solo presso
la fondazione Rockefeller, ma anche presso il critico d’arte americano Ber-
nard Berenson, e senz'altro altrove — ad offrirgli un costante, preziosissimo
!! Maturi (1950), 160.

12 Morandi (1980), III, 391-394.
3 Non saprei che peso assegnare al rapporto Morandi-Conti, ai dati che Renzo de Feli-
ce presenta sull’atteggiamento'tutt’altro che ostile di Morandi, anche fino ai primi anni ’40,
verso riviste ed altre iniziative culturali vicine al regime fascista. De Felice (1983), 583-602.
sostegno morale e materiale. Il commosso ricordo di Conti nella prefazione

del primo volume sulla struttura agraria del contado fiorentino lascia poco
spazio per incertezze su questo conto, anche per l’abbandono momentaneo
di quella reticenza con la quale Conti abitualmente esprimeva i suoi senti-
menti personali. “Nessun discepolo può ricordare senza commozione Gae-
tano Salvemini,” scriveva Conti nel giugno del 1965, “maestro di vita e di
rigore intellettuale. Dal ritorno in Italia fino alla morte, egli mi seguì nel
lavoro, sovvenendomi personalmente di mezzi in momenti difficili. Il suo
ricordo rappresenta per me lo stimolo maggiore a terminare l’opera.”"*
Ma se la presenza di Salvemini, come a suo tempo notò Pampaloni, ebbe

una grande influenza sulle vicende personali di Conti, ci si può domandare
quale fu, effettivamente, l'influenza scientifica di Salvemini sul progetto
Conti, nei momenti della sua formulazione e della sua gestazione intorno al
1950, mentre Conti era l'assistente del grande maestro appena rientrato a
Firenze dopo i lunghi anni d’esilio. Viene spontaneo chiedersi se la decisio-
ne di Conti di riorientare i propri studi, dalla storia post-risorgimentale a
quella medievale, sia stata in qualche modo suggerita, o condizionata da
Salvemini stesso. Non credo che ci siano stati molti coetanei di Conti che
fecero scelte scientifiche apparentemente così drastiche come fu la sua, e
confesso di non avere a disposizione nessun dato concreto che possa
rispondere a questo quesito. Ma mi domando se il modo stesso di espri-
mersi sul proprio progetto non abbia risentito dell'influenza salveminiana.
La lettera di Salvemini a Lane, nella quale il progetto di Conti serviva per
illustrare il passaggio da una aristocrazia imprenditoriale e commerciale ad
una classe dirigente terriera sembra servire da pendant a quelle conclusioni,
arrivate mezzo secolo prima, nel grande libro su i Magnati e popolani. Infat-
ti, scriveva Salvemini nel 1899, riferendosi alla fine del 13° secolo: “Finché
la classe sociale, che creò il Priorato, fu florida e piena di vita, la costituzio-
ne politica funzionò bene; quando il tarlo della decadenza cominciò ad
investire anche la borghesia fiorentina come investe tutte le cose di questo
mondo — allora anche la costituzione politica creata dalla borghesia comin-
ciò a disorganizzarsi, a funzionare in modo incomposto, a sfasciarsi.”! Mi
sembra indubbio che, anche dopo ripensamenti e correzioni abbondante-
mente notate dalla critica, un certo tipo di simmetria, nel concepire lo spie-
gamento di correnti sociali e politiche tra la fine del 13° e la fine del 15°
secolo, caratterizasse il pensiero di Salvemini; il trionfo della borghesia
avvenne nel primo periodo, la sua debolezza e sconfitta nel secondo. E que-
14 Conti (1965), xi.

'5 Salvemini, (1974), 98-99.
sta sconfitta incise profondamente sullo sviluppo della storia italiana nei
secoli successivi, anzi si potrebbe dire che la sconfitta stessa defini i percorsi
della storia dell’Italia moderna. Difficile sapere fino a che punto Conti con-
dividesse le idee del maestro, perché tranne quella domanda per la borsa
Rockefeller non conosco nessuna sua pubblicazione che risale agli anni ’50.
Quando comincerà a pubblicare i primi risultati dei suoi studi nella metà
degli anni ’60, le sue idee, come spero di suggerire fra poco, sembravano già
cambiate, e quell’analisi sociale concepita in astratto prima dell’avvio della
ricerca d’archivio non fu più possibile. Rimane tuttavia la curiosità di sape-
re se quell’accenno alla “base di partenza per la moderna società italiana”
nella domanda per la borsa Rockefeller si riferisse alle stesse correnti e agli
stessi sviluppi della lettera di Salvemini.
Se il problema del rapporto scientifico tra Salvemini e Conti si potrà

approfondire solo dopo la disponibilità di un'ulteriore documentazione —
scritta o orale — mi sembra che tin altro punto in questa breve indagine sulle
fonti del pensiero di Elio Conti intorno agli anni del suo passaggio allo stu-
dio della storia medievale possa essere stabilito con relativamente minore
difficoltà. Anche qui, gli indizi a nostra disposizione — almeno quelli da me
conosciuti — sono indiretti, perché anche in questo caso mancano testimo-
nianze scritte da Conti stesso. Mi riferisco all'esistenza di un certo clima
intellettuale chiaramente discernibile in diversi ambienti scientifici nell Italia
post-bellica, e in modo particolare a Firenze. Un clima che, oltre alla ricerca
di un rinnovamento morale ed ideologico dopo il lungo ventennio fascista,
cercava di individuare nuovi approcci alla ricerca, e più concreti strumenti
analitici con i quali approfondire la conoscenza del passato e del suo rap-
porto con il presente. I termini usati pochi anni or sono da Mario Mirri per
delineare il quadro all’interno del quale aveva avviato le sue ricerche Gior-
gio Giorgetti, un altro storico toscano contemporaneo di Conti e pure lui
prematuramente scomparso, mi sembrano appropriati anche ai nostri scopi.
Scriveva Mirri che una valutazione del lavoro di Giorgetti richiede “la con-
sapevolezza, che egli aveva acutissima, della necessità di utilizzare, nella ela-
borazione dei ricchi materiali... strumenti interpretativi chiaramente indivi-
duati.” E continuava Mirri nell’evocare la figura dell'amico scomparso che,
nel caso non solo di Giorgetti (ma di molti suoi coetanei che si avviavano
verso la ricerca storica) “aveva certamente contribuito ad alimentare in que-
sti giovanissimi studiosi una esigenza profonda di rinnovamento storiografi-
co, l’interesse con cui gli intellettuali italiani guardavano, in quegli anni di
crisi e di esami di coscienza dopo la guerra, al marxismo...” !° Non saprei dire
16 Mirri ((1979), 13-15.

fino a che punto Conti si sarebbe identificato con gli ideali politici di un suo
coetaneo come Giorgetti, probabilmente seguivano strade politiche non del
tutto convergenti. Ma non dovrebbe essere paradossale che i due, come tanti
altri loro coetanei, aspirassero ad impostare un nuovo approccio di studio, e
che cercassero di individuare un metodo ed un linguaggio adatti agli inte-
ressi scientifici che stavano proprio in quegli anni sviluppandosi.
Significativa del clima generale che si era sviluppato a Firenze subito

dopo la guerra, specchio, se si vuole, di tendenze più vaste che influenza-
rono molti giovani, marxisti militanti e non, fu la rivista Società, fondata a
Firenze nel 1945, e diretta da un piccolo gruppo dei più prestigiosi intel-
lettuali di sinistra che nel dopo guerra lavoravano in Toscana, da Giusep-
pe Berti, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Romano Bilenchi, e Delio Canti-
mori, a Ludovico Geymonat, Ambrogio Donnini, Cesare Luporini e Emi-
lio Sereni. È chiara la convergenza tra linee generali del progetto contiano
e indirizzo — di metodo scientifico e forse anche, ma su questo punto con-
fesso la mia ignoranza, di orientamento ideologico — di questa rivista. Que-
sta non è l'occasione adatta per analizzare il peso di questa rivista sullo svi-
luppo degli studi storici nell'immediato dopoguerra, ed io, certo, non sarei
la persona adatta ad intraprendere un tale discorso.!” Nel corso di una
lunga conversazione con Roberto Vivarelli, appresi che Conti possedeva
una collezione completa della rivista, che, ad un certo momento, riorien-
tati i suoi interessi, Conti regalò a Vivarelli. Anche senza questa preziosa
documentazione personale, mi sembra chiaro che fino almeno al momen-
to della stesura della domanda per la borsa Rockefeller, Conti condivides-
se ampiamente l'orientamento della rivista. Cito, perché di grande interes-
se, un passo dalla premessa della nuova serie, avviata con il terzo anno di
pubblicazione, nel 1947:
Abbiamo in odio le discussioni troppo generali... Crediamo che solo con questo
atteggiamento si possa superare la... stasi evidente... insomma uscire dal cerchio di
quella perfezione formale, astrattamente metodologica... Si tratta prima di tutto di
portare nuovi materiali di indagine alla nostra cultura, di portare la sua attenzione
su aspetti e settori della realtà fin ora da essa trascurati. Portare nuovi materiali non
significa naturalmente portare dei materiali grezzi e non elaborati, non interpreta-
ti. Ma significa elaborarli e interpretarli in maniera innanzi tutto analitica, senza
correre a precipizio alle conclusioni, a troppo facili sintesi. Delle troppo facili sin-
tesi, delle conclusioni brillanti e chiuse in se medesime, la cultura italiana è pro-
fondamente stanca...
E continuavano gli autori di questa premessa, la quale, allo stesso tempo,
Gort (1981).
9. SOCIETÀ E FISCO NELLINTERPRETAZIONE DI ELIO CONTI Zio
offriva un orientamento culturale e politico, ed una esortazione a far pro-

prio un certo tipo di lavoro scientifico:
Naturalmente, al centro del nostro interesse sta la storia. Il mondo umano, per
noi comunisti, è mondo storico. Questo ci porta... a contatto con... la cultura stori-
cistica. Proprio in questo contatto ha modo di svilupparsi concretamente un aspet-
to della nostra polemica. Tale cultura storicistica ha finito per chiudersi in un limi-
te ristretto, in un limite astratto, che è poi il vecchio limite umanistico-retorico-let-
terario. Così troppi campi d’indagine, da quello della psiche umana a quello sopra-
tutto dei rapporti sociali e delle strutture economiche vengono da essa... esclusi...
La polemica con questa cultura... intendiamo... svolgerla... in quelle zone che essa
ha trascurato... portandole in primo piano... con scrupolo filologico e con metodo
analitico, perché... non si può precipitare alla sintesi dove c’è ancora quasi tutto da
scavare... !8
Questa lunga citazione, che letta oggi, sembra evocare un ambiente psi-
cologicamente lontano e davvero differente dal nostro, serve, comunque, a
sottolineare affinità di approcéio e di metodo tra la rivista e il giovane stu-
dioso. Ripeto, non sono sicuro se Conti si sarebbe identificato con quel
richiamo della premessa a “noi comunisti,” anche se, in una delle sue con-
versazioni di storia con Francesco Rossi, intorno al 1964, Delio Cantimori
rivendicava, per Conti, il diritto di dirsi, se lo voleva fare, marxista.!? Ma il
punto che a me preme sottolineare non è tanto questo, quanto il grado al
quale, sia nel suo lavoro sul socialismo, che nella concezione della ricerca
che proponeva sulla società fiorentina nel 15° secolo, Conti condividesse un
orientamento comune a molti ambienti intellettuali del tempo e che si espri-
meva con grande chiarezza in questa Premessa. La visione che egli nutriva
del suo studio si imperniava su tutta una serie di punti sottolineati nei passi
appena citati: attenzione allo studio di nuovi materiali, e ad aspetti della
realtà fin’allora trascurati, un’analisi minuziosa e precisa, e, particolarmen-
te importante, i rapporti sociali e le strutture economiche. Essenziale, sia
per i redattori della rivista che per Conti, era quel complesso di concetti che
riguardavano le strutture sociali del passato, e l’analisi delle classi sociali,
che avrebbero accompagnato le indagini minuziose di nuovi materiali tra-
scurati da studiosi precedenti.
Infine, c’era la tradizione storico-archivistica, che aveva plasmato molto

lavoro storiografico, certo non solo in Toscana, ma con risultati particolar-
mente felici per la conoscenza del passato fiorentino sin dai tempi del-
l’Aiazzi e Polidori, Del Lungo, Guasti e Rodolico. Armando Sapori, i cui
18 Società, INI (1947), 3-10.

1 Cantimori (1967), 119.
Studi di storia economica, uscirono la prima volta nel 1940, offriva una trac-
cia nella Prefazione di quel volume per chi ambisse di seguire il suo meto-
do storico. In fatti, scriveva Sapori:
Mentre l’archivio fiorentino mi offrì una mèsse inaspettata dei vecchi scritti che
cercavo, la pazienza e la tecnica dell’archivista mi aiutarono e mi guidarono nelle
ricerche in altre fonti... tutti imiei lavori mossero dà documenti inediti... Ogni volta
raccolsi attorno ad un argomento quanto più documenti potei e, a costo di essere
tacciato di pedanteria, dopo averli sfruttati nel loro insieme ed in ogni loro parti-
colare, li pubblicai per intero o con la maggiore larghezza consentitami, ma tutta-
via in modo organico.
Se questo passo poteva servire ad un giovane storico fiorentino degli
anni Quaranta come guida per un suo studio di quella società fiorentina
studiata ormai da più di un decennio dal Sapori, una spiegazione ulteriore
in quello stesso documento ci ricorderà un punto di non secondaria impor-
tanza sul quale il giovane Conti avrebbe dissentito dal Sapori, il quale spie-
gava:
Ai documenti non chiesi notizie sulla massa dei piccoli artigiani che ricalcavano a
passo a passo le vie consuetudinarie della tradizione: né queste notizie, d'altronde,
avrebbero potuto fornirmele, perché il ricordo dei poveri non sopravvive alla fine
della loro esistenza; ma domandai piuttosto informazioni sui grandi mercanti...?°
Non mi sembra necessario soffermarmi sul possibile significato dell’e-
sempio fornito dal lavoro di Sapori, anche se (considerate le divergenze
politiche e ideologiche tra Sapori e Conti) mi preme sottolineare che non si
tratta di un esempio isolato, ma, tutt'al contrario, di una profonda e viva
trazione storiografica rappresentata in modo particolarmente autorevole in
quegli anni negli studi di Armando Sapori, ma non solo suoi. Questa tradi-
zione offriva l'ancoraggio empirico per una ricerca ambiziosa sulla società
fiorentina che un giovane storico avrebbe potuto avviare nei primi anni
Cinquanta.
Arrivati qui, è auspicabile ritornare al punto di partenza della nostra

indagine, cioè appurare il rapporto tra la visione contiana della società, e i
suoi studi sulla storia fiscale. Questa lunga deviazione, che qualcuno
potrebbe considerare una incursione in territorio che dovrebbe spettare ad
un altro relatore del nostro convegno, mi è sembrata necessaria per collo-
care con una certa precisione all’interno del suo vasto ed ambizioso pro-
getto di ricerca i volumi dedicati da Conti alla storia fiscale. Possiamo ora
procedere abbastanza rapidamente verso una ipotesi conclusiva. Ma prima
2 Sapori (1955), I, xv-xvi.

9. SOCIETÀ E FISCO NELLINTERPRETAZIONE DI ELIO CONTI DI
di arrivarci, è necessario affrontare un punto che spero non sia inopportu-

no sollevare in questa occasione, ed è questo: è innegabile che Elio Conti
non poté portare a termine la ricerca secondo il suo programma originario;
che certo la morte prematura gli ha impedito per sempre di concluderlo
secondo i suoi desideri, ma che comunque i tempi e i modi di realizzazione
del progetto si erano dilatati di molto rispetto alle previsioni iniziali. Cer-
care di capire il perché mi sembra essenziale ai nostri fini.
Una risposta implicita a questo quesito mi pare che si trovi nella doman-
da inoltrata da Conti il 5 marzo 1963 per una borsa di studio alla Villa I
Tatti. Cito i primi passi di questo breve documento perché ci offre un con-
trasto abbastanza chiaro con le posizioni di Conti di undici anni prima:
Sto lavorando a un’opera in più volumi — col titolo generale di: “La società fiorenti-
na nel Quattrocento” sul background economico, sociale e politico del Rinascimen-
to fiorentino. In 12 anni di ricerche ho fatto uno spoglio sistematico di tutti i prin-
cipali archivi finanziari, amministrativi, familiari raccolti nell'Archivio di Stato di
Firenze e costituenti un complesso di molte tonnellate di carte. Ho già in gran parte
ordinato, elaborato e ridotto in tabelle statistiche — sulla demografia, l'economia, la
distribuzione della proprietà, la struttura sociale, l’organizzazione amministrativa, la
composizione e la circolazione dei gruppi dirigenti — il materiale ricavato.
Il primo volume dell’opera, relativo ai rapporti fra la città e la campagna... sarà con-
segnato all’editore...entro la primavera. E ho già quasi pronti altri tre volumi, di
“studi, testi e documenti” sui “Catasti fiorentini del Quattrocento”... Il primo con-
tiene uno studio sul sistema fiscale della Repubblica fiorentina e una raccolta di
testi legislativi. Il secondo uno studio sulle denuncie dei redditi dei Fiorentini nel
Quattrocento e una scelta delle medesime...?!
Ci sarebbero varie osservazioni da fare su questi passi del documento
del 1963. Innanzitutto, va notato lo spostamento — chiaro e significativo,
secondo me — dell’attenzione di Conti alla dimensione empirica del suo
progetto. Si potrebbe dire che nel corso di quegli anni, il consiglio di Sapo-
ri — di raccogliere attorno ad un argomento quanti più documenti si può —
aveva lentamente ma sicuramente spostato dal centro dell’attenzione di
Conti gli impulsi di metodo che provenivano da Morandi, Salvemini, e da
Società. Mentre nei primi anni ’50, la ricerca di Conti si era posta il com-
pito di poggiare su due colonne metodologiche portanti, quella empirica e
21 Settignano (Firenze) — Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renais-
sance Studies — Programma di ricerca del candidato Elio Conti, 5 marzo 1963. Ringrazio la
Signora Nelda Ferrace della Villa I Tatti per avermi molto gentilmente inviato fotocopia di
questo documento, e per il permesso di farvi riferimento in questo saggio.
quella sociologica, dal passo appena citato, si potrebbe dedurre che, nel-
l’arco dei precedenti undici anni, la dimensione sociologica del progetto
era diventata molto più labile. Ovviamente, il progetto non era cambiato
in modo drastico, ma nel modo stesso in cui Conti si esprimeva nel 1963 si
può individuare un’attenuazione della sua attenzione per l’analisi della
società fiorentina concepita in termini sociologici e l’accentuazione invece
del suo interesse per quelle montagne di documenti alle quali accenna con
un certo orgoglio nella sua domanda del 1963. Sarebbe interessante cerca-
re di capire le ragioni che contribuirono a questo non insensibile cambia-
mento di metodo: mancanza di fiducia nell’efficacia di quelle categorie
generiche — quelle classi sociali alle quali aveva fatto riferimento sia nel suo
primo libro, che nella sua domanda alla Rockefeller? Avversione verso ana-
lisi astratte, accompagnata da un fascino per la concretezza dei documen-
ti di archivio, e per problemi ermeneutici di un loro impiego intelligente e
raffinato? La sensazione, insomma, che non fosse più possibile filtrare i
documenti da lui studiati attraverso le categorie sociali che aveva pensato
di poter adoperare nelle sue analisi? Oppure, ancora, la forza di una lunga
tradizione culturale nel concepire il modo stesso della ricerca storica, una
tradizione che privilegiava il più possibile il momento della raccolta docu-
mentaria a quello di una loro analisi astratta? Non saprei rispondere con
sicurezza. Ma mi sembra che una, o più, di queste ipotesi potrebbe offrir-
ci la chiave per la lettura di questo secondo documento.
Quello che invece mi appare molto chiaro è che la decisione di racco-
gliere una parte della sua ricerca in una serie di volumi dedicati allo studio
della fiscalità coincise con il momento di maggiore concentrazione sulla
dimensione empirica a scapito di quella sociologica. Quello “studio sul siste-
ma fiscale della Repubblica fiorentina” sembra essere — ma non lo fu esatta-
mente — il volume L'imposta diretta pubblicato nel 1984, come appendice
della sua edizione critica dei ricordi fiscali di Matteo Palmieri. Il punto sul
quale vorrei insistere, cioè, è che, più che attraverso una serie di approfon-
dimenti di ipotesi sulla struttura sociale fiorentina, o di generalizzazioni sul
rapporto fra fiscalità e società, il confronto di Conti con la storia fiscale di
Firenze avvenne nel corso di un suo dialogo, intenso quanto prolungato, con
le fonti della storia toscana del quindicesimo secolo. Erano le fonti stesse a
suggerirgli l’importanza delle tasse dirette, era il documento redatto dallo
speziale Matteo Palmieri a sollevare una gamma di problemi concreti intor-
no ai quali stendere la sua lunga analisi della storia fiscale fiorentina. Ed
erano i documenti — quelli di cancellerie governative, o di enti pubblici, di
contabilità privata, i rogiti notarili, gli epistolari pubblici e privati, le crona-
che e storie umanistiche e volgari — a creare quel quadro all’interno del quale
era possibile studiare la storia della fiscalità toscana nel tardo medioevo.
È superfluo insistere su questo punto, che mi sembra del tutto ovvio a

chi abbia studiato i due volumi ricchissimi sulla fiscalità fiorentina. Questi
due tomi rappresentano una miniera straordinaria di informazioni, un rege-
sto, se vogliamo, di un sterminato numero di fonti. L’analisi intrapresa in
questi volumi si snoda attraverso una serie di collegamenti interni alla sto-
ria della fiscalità fiorentina del 15° secolo, con un’attenzione straordinaria-
mente intensa dedicata alla comprensione di temi e di termini che nessuno
finora aveva capito fino in fondo. Basta ricordare quel riferimento, direi
drammatico per la sua laconicità e per il contrasto che offre con il metodo
seguito da tanti di noi, costretti a lavorare frettolosamente per rispettare
scadenze di convegni e di case editrici, nel quale Conti rivela una dimen-
sione del suo rigorosissimo approccio alle fonti. Nel 1983, scriveva nella
“Nota a testo” dei Ricordi fiscali: “A familiarizzare il lettore con tutti i ter-
mini tecnici, con i vocaboli desueti o usati con significati diversi da quelli
comuni, con gli istituti politici e amministrativi del tempo, nonché a spie-
gargli il significato esatto di tutti i passi che possono presentare qualche dif-
ficoltà, provvede — forse con eccessiva pedanteria — l’ampio glossario. Il
testo fino a p. 280, già stampato nel 1971, compare con tanto ritardo anche
per una lunga interruzione nell’ingrata fatica di completare il glossario.”
E difficile imagine molti colleghi disposti a trattenere le bozze di un libro
per ben dodici anni prima di licenziare la loro pubblicazione, per poter
completare un glossario tecnico, il cui scopo era quello di chiarire il signifi-
cato dei documenti analizzati nel corpo del testo. Ma, ormai negli anni ’60
— probabilmente ancora più intensamente con il passaggio degli anni — l’at-
tenzione di Conti per la complessità della vasta base empirica che aveva rac-
colto in decenni di lavoro andava crescendo e i documenti, in tutti i loro
significati multipli, sostituivano la centralità della categoria “società.”
In fin dei conti, mi sembra che questo sia il merito maggiore — ma anche
il problema più acuto — della ricerca contiana sulla fiscalità. Perché, mentre
da un lato la sua padronanza delle fonti diventava sempre più formidabile,
mentre quasi certamente con il passare degli anni diventava l’unico studio-
so in tutta la lunga storiografia della sua città adottiva ad aver capito dal-
l'interno tante manifestazioni della sua complessa storia medievale, le cate-
gorie analitiche extra documentarie rimanevano appartate rispetto al centro
della sua attenzione, e non erano più né sufficientemente duttili, né abba-
stanza capienti da dar conto della ricchezza documentaria che lui stesso
portava alla luce. Se l'allargamento del suo trattamento della storia fioren-
tina lo spingeva fino a temi di storia fiscale, questo allargamento esigeva un
prezzo, che era una forte attenuazione della dimensione sociale del suo pro-
getto originale.
È difficile imaginare fino a che punto gli studi di Conti sulla fiscalità —
ma non solo questi — possono essere presi come modello da altri storici per
lo studio di problemi analoghi a quelli che attirarono la sua attenzione. Il
suo nome non è legato a una tesi forte — come, per esempio, lo furono Sal-
vemini e Ottokar per la storia politica e sociale della Firenze della fine del
Duecento, 0, in tempi più recenti, sono stati i-lavori di Jones e Herlihy sul
significato della mezzadria, oppure, tanto per fare due esempi non fiorenti-
ni, i libri di Cracco e Ventura sulla storia sociale e politica di Venezia, o gli
articoli di Berengo, Chittolini e Fasano sulla natura degli stati territoriali
nell'Italia tardo-medievale e moderna. Non è facile immaginare giovani o
non giovani storici disposti ad intraprendere una fatica immane come quel-
la accettata quasi come sfida dal giovane Conti nei primi anni Cinquanta. In
questo senso è difficile che il suo lavoro possa rappresentare un esempio da
imitare, perché sono così rari gli studiosi disposti ad accettare tali sfide. Ma
un’altra dimensione di quello stesso lavoro rimane come monumento impo-
nente, guida per chi, come fu Elio Conti nella fine degli anni Quaranta e nei
primi anni Cinquanta, nutrisse l'ambizione di studiare un grande problema
storico, basandosi su materiali nuovi e su nuove domande da sottoporre a
questo materiale. Questo monumento Conti lo costruì non solo di pazien-
za e di lavoro estremamente arduo, ma anche di una onestà intellettuale
implacabile, di una determinazione irremovibile a capire quei documenti da
lui scavati in termini che erano loro propri, e di non far condizionare la sua
comprensione da categorie preconcette, delle quali avvertiva l’inutilità per
i suoi scopi. I due magnifici volumi sulla storia della fiscalità sono parte
integrante di questo più grande monumento.
10.
THE CLOSING OF THE FLORENTINE ARCHIVES
The Archivio di Stato of Florence forever closed its doors at the Palaz-
zo degli Uffizi at noon on December 31, 1987. A melancholy ceremony,
held in the old reading room and improvised by some of the forty-odd
scholars in attendance that morning, marked the event. A few bottles of
spumante were opened and Signora Paola Peruzzi, an attendant in the read-
ing room for the past eighteen years, proposed a toast bidding the rapid
reopening of the Archive in its newly built palazzo, in Piazza Beccaria.
The news of this move has been known for years. Anyone passing Piaz-
za Beccaria — about two kilometers east of the Uffizi and a few meters north
of the ancient Porta della Giustizia, where in the Middle Ages criminals
were executed — has been able to note the slow rise of the inelegant and
heavy-set building that slowly took shape over the past decade and that was
brought to completion this past winter. The calendar of the trasloco (for
even non-Italian scholars soon started referring to the move by using the
Italian word) was made public last summer. The old Archive would close
on December 31, 1987. It would reopen nine months later, on October 1,
1988, in its new home. Even so, many of those present at the wistful cere-
mony still appeared hardly reconciled to what one of them, perhaps with an
understandable bit of rhetorical exaggeration given the sentimental tone of
the occasion, called an epochal event. There was a lot of searching for the
parole giuste to characterize the closing of an institution that, in some of its
previous incarnations, one can date back to the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury and that in recent decades has offered an unusually collegial and
friendly working atmosphere where scholars of many nationalities, not a
few of whom in the past thirty-odd years have been American, conducted
their studies. Passata la festa, muttered Signor Nasi, the lame usher whose
pleasant smile has greeted scholars for more than a quarter of a century, as
they reached, often breathless, the top of the seemingly endless stairs from
the cortile of the Uffizi to the Archive’s lobby. And only a little later, an Eng-
lish scholar, unable to contain his exasperation at the turn of events, was
overheard exclaiming to a friend that what we were witnessing was incred-
ible, “like the monkeys leaving the Rock of Gibraltar!”
The relocation of the Archivio di Stato from the Uffizi has been a topic
of much agitated discussion in Florence and elsewhere. Causes of the
debate are not hard to find: the sense, among users of the Archive, that the
change in the Uffizi will alter the very character of this great architectural
monument — one of the key landmarks in the city’s urban landscape; and a
further sense that this change, even if it were to prove beneficial to the
Archive, was imposed on it as a result of a lobbying campaign by two pow-
erful and, for the moment, allied forces: on the one hand, the tourist indus-
try, intent on converting the city’s historic center into a modern commercial
and entertainment bazaar; on the other, the administration of the museum
of the Uffizi, eager to create the grandi Uffizi, an art gallery better able to
exhibit the museum’s vast and famous holdings and to compete in terms of
prestige with other great European museums.
The very name of the Uffizi — Offices or Magistracies — signifies its origi-
nal function. Built in the mid-sixteenth century for the commodita de’ sud-
ditt et ornamento della città by Cosimo I, the new building was meant to
house some of the principal magistracies and their archives. This double
function was served until the mid-eighteenth century, when the extinction
of the Medici line set the stage for a vast political and administrative reor-
ganization of Tuscany undertaken by the Hapsburg Lorena line, the state’s
new rulers. Many of the magistracies created during the preceding two cen-
turies or more were abolished and the space they occupied in the Uffizi was
made available for other uses. During the last decades of the eighteenth
century and the first of the nineteenth, documentary collections held until
then in other locations were transferred to the Uffizi. The archive of the
riformagioni (the public acts of the republican regime stored until then in
the Palazzo Vecchio) was moved there in 1769; the diplomatico (the collec-
tion of loose parchments) in 1778; the archives of the suppressed religious
orders (corporazioni religiose soppresse) in 1817; the Medici papers in 1818;
and in the 1820s much of the documentation (Decima and Monte) regard-
ing the fiscal history of the republican and ducal eras.
This process of consolidation culminated in 1852 in the creation, by

Duke Leopold II, of the Archivio centrale di stato, to which was assigned
“the eastern part of the building known as the Uffizi.” Since then, visitors
entering the lobby of the Archive have been reminded of this event by the
sculpted bust of Leopold perched in a circular niche high up the wall fac-
10. THE CLOSING OF THE FLORENTINE ARCHIVES 225
ing the entrance. Three large plaques, one placed below the bust, the other
two on the walls flanking the entrance, provide a capsule history of the
events surrounding the creation of the Archivio — renamed, following the
unification of Italy, the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. One learns from the
inscriptions on these plaques that the optimus princeps, wishing to encour-
age historical studies and to safeguard the rights of the state and of indi-
viduals, created this »zaximum archive and placed it in amplissimis quarters,
where citizens and foreigners were to be admitted /iberaliter, to the end of
increasing knowledge and wisdom (eruditionem, doctrinamquae).
Given this long tradition, the news that the Archivio would lose its his-
toric home created much unhappiness among its habitués. Not many of
them seemed to remember that the issue of a total or partial move was
raised shortly after the last war and that as eminent a historian as Armando
Sapori had favored it, his reasoning being that the enormous accumulation
of paper in the Uffizi represénted a fire hazard to the art gallery located on
the third floor. Other arguments were raised by others, not the least telling
of which was the extreme overcrowding of the storage rooms and the inad-
equate and even dangerous conditions in which the clerks worked. Initial-
ly, it was proposed that one or more of the vast, unused sixteenth-century
convents — S. Verdiana, S. Orsola, or even the Murate, converted in more
recent times into a prison might serve the function. In the end, these proj-
ects were discarded and, following the disastrous flood of November 1966,
the decision was reached to construct a new building, fully equipped with
the technological and mechanical infrastructures necessary to the function-
ing of a modern archive and better able to accommodate both the kilome-
ters of new shelves required to store the quantities of more recently pro-
duced documents that, by law, must be deposited in it, and the immensely
larger number of scholars who since the late 1960s have crowded the read-
ing room of the Archivio.
This decision did not pass uncontested. Under the leadership of Sergio
Bertelli, a number of eminent Florentine intellectuals and distinguished
fiorentinisti protested the illusory pursuit of a grandeur fiorentina that
would denature the Uffizi, contribute to the even greater crowding of the
Piazza della Signoria, and create an immense museum impossible for the
vast majority of tourists to enjoy. Others objected that Piazza Beccaria,
already too crowded and in need of a park, should be spared the addition
of a new, massive building; and that in order to construct the new Archiv-
io, the state would have to order the demolition of one of the most impor-
tant fascist architectural monuments in Florence.
DDA FIRENZE NEL QUATTROCENTO
Still others pointed out that, given the substantial damage caused by the
flood or 1966, it might be wiser to choose a site more distant from the river,
in a location not as exposed to flooding as is Piazza Beccaria. A few solitary
voices, unable to attract much attention, proposed a via di mezzo: let the
new Archivio be built in order to accommodate some of the more recently
acquired documents, but let the bulk of the older documentation remain in
the Uffizi, part of whose interior structure could be appropriately modern-
ized and restructured, These suggestions notwithstanding, the project went
ahead. On October 7, 1971, the Gazzetta ufficiale published the terms of a
public competition for the design of a new Archivio, and in January 1974
the project was entrusted to a group of architects led by Italo Gamberini.
Despite a number of predictions that the project could not be completed zz
vila nostra, progress on it was reasonably rapid. Last summer, Giuseppe
Pansini, director of the Archivio, publicly announced plans for the trasloco.
The last few months in the history of the Archivio were not happy ones.
Neither scholars nor archivists seemed able to rise to the demands of a dif-
ficult occasion. The stubborn skepticism of many scholars to believe that
the move would take place was translated into a veritable panic once the
realization sank in that the move was imminent and that, consequently, the
Archivio would shut down — at least for several months. Already last sum-
mer, the number of presences in the reading room had increased sharply.
By late October it was impossible to accommodate everyone wishing
access. Tensions rose, lines began forming outside the large portone before
the opening of the Archive, and scholars accustomed to working in an
atmosphere of great civility and mutual cooperation were surprised to dis-
cover their voices becoming sharper and their patience running short as,
every morning, they rushed first to grab a seat and then spent the rest of
the day rushing through their daily allotment of documents. Nor did the
passage of time improve the situation. By November, two queues were
being formed: first to place one’s name on a list of presences and then, on
the basis of that list, to receive a number, equivalent to an entrance ticket
to the reading room. By December, one could ensure receiving one of
these prized numbers (1-52, equivalent to the number of seats in the read-
ing room) only by arriving, at the latest, by 7:30 A.M. A small cluster of
unusually devoted scholars (the wltras), in search of the “good” numbers
which would entitle them to seats near the window, would invariably arrive
by 7:00 to write their names on the list and then, shortly after 7:30, to
receive the prized number and wait for the doors of the reading room to
open at 9:00. Scholars with high numbers had to wait in the lobby (and
some waited for four hours or more) before a seat was freed and their
number was called.
10. THE CLOSING OF THE FLORENTINE ARCHIVES 225
Archivists, for their part, seemed to have been caught off guard by the
large increase in the number of users and by their great anxiety. The work
load imposed on archivists and clerks increased manyfold. Many of them
worked long hours and spared no effort to remain helpful, courteous, and
cheerful. But the amount of work, the confusion caused by so large a num-
ber of users, and the demands they made took their toll. To make matters
worse, there was an aura of improvisation and an apparent lack of clarity in
the formulation of guidelines, and the failure of senior administrators to
make any effort to assuage the anxieties of scholars did not help.
By the time of the Archive’ s closing, at noon on December 31, every one
seemed relieved that the intensely felt ritual of the preceding few weeks had
come to an end: scholars were exhausted by the regular reveille before
dawn six mornings a week, and archivists by the relentlessly intense pace of
work. The old Archivio closed in the midst of this exhaustion — a feeling
that was tinged, nonetheless, by widespread anxiety about the opening of
the new building. The question on everyone’s mind is how soon the extraor-
dinary riches of the Fiorentine Archivio di Stato will once again be made
available for study. The direction of the Archivio has issued a number of
categorical assurances that the new site will be fully functioning on Octo-
ber 1, 1988. Yet a communiqué by ANSA (the semi-official Italian press
agency) dated January 1, 1988, contained a passage that was bound to exac-
erbate the suspicions and anxieties of many scholars: “ “Ten months,’
observe members of the direction of the Archivio, ‘may not be enough for
the move of all the material, whose new and definitive organization cer-
tainly will require a longer period of time.’ “ It is not clear if this statement
is based on official declarations or on rumors. Certainly the rumors at the
time of this writing (January 3, 1988) are numerous. Were some of the dire
predictions to prove partially or fully correct, it is difficult to imagine how
the Archivio in Piazza Beccaria might help to continue the spirit of conge-
niality and cheerful sociability in which, for over a century, scholars carried
out their studies in the Palazzo degli Uffizi.
VA
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INDEX"
Acciaioli Agnolo, cardinal, 57 Baldassarre di Luigi da Prato, 63

— Angelo, 53 Banderai Paolo di Piero, 58, 113, 168,
— Donato, 56, 57 204 -
— family, 60, 66, 68 Barbadoro B., 98
Accolti Benedetto, 68 : Barbagallo C., 25
Aegean sea, 23 Barbarigo Andrea, 72, 93
Agli, family, 154 — Niccolò di Andrea, 72
Aiazzi A., 215 Barberis W., 38
Albizzi Maso degli, 56 Barcelona, 128
— Piero degli, 55 Bardi Alessandro di Bernardo de’, 101
— Rinaldo degli, 43 — Bindo di Jacopo de’, 102
= Tailily, 2,45 91 — Jacopo di Vieri de’, 102
Alessandro di Vanni di Lotteringo, 101 — Rodolfo, 102
Alfonso V Trastamara, king of Aragon — family, 100-102, 106
and Naples, 171, 174, 195 Barducct R., 98,111, 113, 124
Alighieri Dante, 22 Barnes D.G., 7
Alps, 40 lsyyrom Il, 253 DIL DE
Ammirato Scipione, 5 Baronci Rinieri, 179
Angiolini F, 27 Bartoli, family, 60
Antonio di Piero da Verzaia, 51 Beccanugi Leonardo di Niccolò, 178
Anzilotti A., 2, 35, 167, 210 Becker M.. 2 0 11, 135312534) 71.
Appennines, 40 81, 98, 113, 168, 180, 204
Ardant G., 166 Bellandi Donato, 57
INRGPAOY, IU Mek, 23), HA 8, 22) Bentham Jeremy, 28
Arimberto, bishop, 37 Berengo M., 27, 28, 35, 170, 220
Arrighi Jacopo di Francesco, 179 Berenson B., 211
Athens, 20-24, 28, 29 Bernardino da Siena, san, 48
Attica, 20 Bertelli S., 223
Australia, 32 Berti G., 214
‘ The name ‘Florence’ has been omitted, while names of places within Florence have
been included.
Besta E., 168 Carnesecchi, family, 60

Betto Fesulanus, 110 Carondini Tommaso di Domenico, 58
Bianchi Bandinelli R., 214 Casentino, 17
Bilenchi R., 214 Cecchi Piero di ser Marianno, 61
Bindo di Duccio, 110 Cederni Bartolomeo, 61, 62
Bizzocchi R., 185 Cegia Agostino, 135
Bloch M., 210 Chabod'E, 2; 7, 32, 34, 35, 37, 88, 167,
Boccanegra Simon, 75, 173, 174, 195 Is los
Boissevain J., 38, 56 Charles V of Habsburg, emperor, 168
Bologna, 195 Charles VIII of Valois, king of France,
Bongianni Zanobi di Jacopo, 143 19
Boni, family, 61 Chicago, 9
Bonvesin della Riva, 22 Chittolini G., 15, 24, 28, 31, 36-39, 169,
Borgherini Niccolò, 137 17019220
— Salvi, 137 Church W., 70
Bowsky W., 204 Ciappelli G., 13, 71, 131
Braun R., 166 Cicero, 165
Bremen, 76 Cioni Tommaso di ser Piero, 59
Brown A., 13, 45, 131-134, 140-143, Cipolla C., 71
WAHL, AGS SSIS US She Sv ID. Il Clearfield J., 69
162 Cocchi Donati, family, 60
Brown J., 126, 187 Cohn S., 49, 52, 53, 69, 184
Brucker G., 6, 7, 31, 44, 45, 49, 57, 113, Cola di Jacopo da Ascoli, 57
184, 204 ~ Compagni Dino, 55
Bruni Leonardo, 5, 7, 22 Condulmer see Eugenio IV
Brunner O., 27 Connell W., 185, 187
Bruto Giovan Michele, 5 Contarini Niccolò, 198
Bucher K., 25 Conti EH, 13, 14074 73 ti beige
Budapest, 66 203-220
Bueno de Mesquita D., 36 Cornell T., 21
Bullard M., 10 Cortona, 23, 181
Buondelmonti Filippo di Lorenzo, 136 Cozzi G., 36, 196
— Tegghiaio, 146, 147, 162 Cracco G., 220
Burckhardt J., 2, 32
Burr Litchfield R., 36, 192 Dati Gregorio, 5
Day Jeol
Cacciaguida, 22 De Felice R., 211
Calderoni Anselmo, 45 De Roover BR... 13,44. 132 133, 133,
Cambi Giovanni, 131 138, 144, 205
Canigiani Daniello di Luigi, 84 Del Lungo I., 215
— family, 60, 100 Del Treppo M., 195
Cantimori D., 214, 215 Della Stufa Ugo di Andrea, 64
Capponi G., 5 — family, 60, 68
Capponi, family, 66, 187 Diaz i. 96.1927 1.95
Carlo di Calabria, Duke of Athens, 55, Dietisalvi Dietisalvi Neroni, 69
74, 172 — family, 60
INDEX 243
Dini B., 90 — church of Santa Maria sopra Porta,

Dino Attaviani de Castagnuolo, 98 58
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 21 — gonfalone Bue, 60
Dohna Christoph von, 198 — gonfalone Carro, 60
Domenico di Guasparre Simone, 62 — gonfalone Chiavi, 60
Domenico di ser Santi, 143 — gonfalone Drago, 58-61
Donnini A., 214 — gonfalone Ferza, 58
Douai, 76, 175 — gonfalone Lion Bianco, 60
Duke of Athens see Charles of Calabria — gonfalone Lion d’Oro, 58, 60
Durand Y:31 — gonfalone Lion Nero, 60
— gonfalone Lion Rosso, 34, 58, 60
Edward IV Plantagenet, king of Eng- — gonfalone Ruote, 60
land, 134 — gonfalone Scala, 59, 60
Elias N., 166, 169, 170 — gonfalone Unicorno, 59, 60
England, 7, 32, 40, 86, 87 — gonfalone Vaio, 60
Ercole F., 35 — gonfalone Vipera, 59, 60
Este, 18 x — Le Murate, 223
Eugenius IV (Gabriele Condulmer), — Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, 185
papa, 76 — Palazzo Vecchio, 46, 52, 222
Europe, 26, 36, 40,76, 86, 166, 169, — parish of Santa Maria alla Verzaia,
LE SS), OB) D?
— Piazza Beccaria, 4, 221, 223-225
Farnese, family, 195 — Piazza della Signoria, 51, 223
Fasano Guarini E., 28, 36, 37, 170, 192, — popolo di San Lorenzo, 62
194, 220 — popolo di San Tommaso, 62
Febvre L., 210 — quartiere di San Giovanni, 109, 149,
Federigo Curradi de Alamania, 53 157
Ferrace N., 217 — quartiere di Santa Maria Novella,
Ferrara, 65, 138, 201 109
Filippo da Gagliano, 154, 155 — quartiere di Santo Spirito, 97-99,
Filippo di Andrea Nerini, 110 104, 105, 107-111
Finley M., 19, 20, 25 — Sant'Orsola, 223
ran, OA — Santa Verdiana, 223
Flanders, 73, 172 = Uttar 2 1-224
Florence, Archivio di Stato, 1, 4, 5, 11, Se Villa Tatci-217
21782212225 Fortebracci Niccolò, 67
— Bargello, 138 Foscari Francesco, doge of Venice, 66
— Borgo Ognissanti, 99 France, 48, 73, 165, 172
— church of Camaldoli, 51, 52 Francesco di Tommaso Giovanni, 50-
— church of San Felice in Piazza, 58, D2
99 Franco di Rosso, 69
— church of San Firenze, 51 Frescobaldi, family, 100
— church of San Frediano, 58 Fubini R., 181, 184
— church of San Lorenzo, 58, 63, 64
- church of San Pancrazio, 58 Galasso G., 36, 202
— church of Santa Croce, 51 Gamberini I., 224
Garin Beis 295 Jones Ph., 25-28, 39, 220

Genet J.-Ph., 167, 169
Genoa, 17, 71, 75-80, 90-94, 128, 171, Kent D., 6, 7, 10, 33, 43, 44, 59, 62, 63,
Wa, Ue, ere AAO AO 165
204 Kent FEW. 7, 10,33, 58, 60, 185
George III, king of England, 7 Kirshner J., 116
Germany, 73 Klapisch-Zuber C., 6, 12, 127
Geymonat L., 214 Koenigsberger H., 41
Gherardini Niccolo, 57
Giacomini di Piero, 59 Landuccio ser Landi de Beccis, 98
Gilbert F, 31 Vanek a2 ola 20682 tz
Gioffré D., 92 Lapini Bartolomeo di Giovanni, 59
Giorgetti G., 213 Leoli Burgundio, 19
Giovanbattista dell’Ottonaio, 48 Leopold H Habsburg Lorena, Duke of
Giovanni da Volterra, 49 Tuscany, 222
Given };, 169 Lepre A., 39
Gladstone W., 73 Liguria, 40
Gleason A., 70 Littlewood P., 38, 56
Goldthwaite R., 71, 122, 126, 127 Livorno, 181, 192
Gonzaga Ludovico, Marquis of Man- Livy, 21
tua, /6 Lombardy, 36, 40, 42
Greece, 21, 28 London, 134
Grabb iS 1150628 L'opez:R:S 3230714
Gualtieri di Brienne, 74, 172 Lorenzo di Andrea, 64
Guasconi Filippo di Biagio de’, 64 Low Countries, 73, 172
Guasti C., 215 Lübeck, 76
Guicciardini Francesco, 4, 5, 11, 15, 29, Luca da Panzano, 158
129) IDL, SAL 65 Pucca N43 47 945 1825201
— Piero di Luigi, 68 Luporini C., 214
Guidalotti Guidalotto Uberti de’, 110 Luzzati M., 81
— Lapo di Lippo de’, 110 Luzzatto!G.,-25 7581907981604
— Michele Litti de’, 110 204
— family, 109 Lyon, 135
Guidi Giovanni, 128
Machiavelli Niccolò, 5, 29, 88, 91, 93,
Habsburg Lorena, family, 222 94131) 1345165, 1665201
Hamburg, 76, 175 Maczak A., 40
Hartung F, 32 Maffeo Andrea, 66
Fleers |, 92; 168,204 Mainz, 76
Herlihy D., 6, 12, 71, 127, 204, 220 Malegonelle, family, 60
Huizinga ).;211 Malinowski B., 28
Mantua Marquis of see Gonzaga Ludo-
Italy, 15, 19-22-28, 35-38, 40, 41, 66, vico
68, 71°75, 747165, 1167 16S 170. Mantua, 76
172173193185 19D 2200s: Marco di Bartolomeo da Paretes, 137
209, 2AN-213, 2202223 Marco di Zanobi, 90
INDEX 245
Marks L., 12, 85, 89, 114, 125, 132, 133, Montefeltro Federico da, Duke of Urbi-
135, 161, 169 no, 65
Martelli Niccolò di Ugolino, 63 Montpellier, 137
Martines L., 31-33, 204 Morandi C., 209-211, 217
Masi Francesco di ser Tommaso, 59 Morelli Giovanni di Pagolo, 60
Mattingly G., 2, 7 — Lorenzo di Matteo, 189
Maturi W., 211 — family, 60, 154
Medici Alamanno de’, 119, 120 Morrison A., 116
— Bardi Contessina de’, 152 Mousnier R., 31, 32, 36, 40
— Cosimo di Giovanni de’, (Cosimo il Mozzarelli C., 27
Vecchio), 9, 10, 43-70, 84, 144, 152, | Munich, Historisches Kolleg, 8
164, 186, 190 Muratori Ludovico Antonio, 209
— Cosimo I de’, Duke of Florence, 36, Musi A., 36, 168, 200
ISS), ISIN 2
= family; 9, 11-13, 33,44-70,-84, 134- Najemy].,6
1645186" Si7e 222 Namier L., 7, 8
— Giovanni di Bicci de’, 43, 30, 64 Naples, 39; 61, 63, 65, 6971194171,
— Giovanni di Lorenzo de’, later Pope 1175 dr 19582008201
Leo X, 135 Nardi Iacopo, 5, 131
— Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’, 146 — family, 60
— Giuliano di Piero de’, 141 Nerli Filippo, 5
— Lorenzo di Giovanni de’, 45 — family, 100
— Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’, 146 Nerone di Nigi Neroni, 179
— Lorenzo di Piero de’, (Lorenzo il Newton J.,49
Magnifico), 10, 12, 13, 38, 53, 85, Niccolini, family, 60
125, 13:1-164,,189-191 Niccolò Niccolai de Alamania, 53
— Orsini Clarice de’, 152 Nigi di Nerone di Nigi, 179
— Pierfrancesco di Lorenzo de’, 141, Nippel W., 15
146 Nobili M., 25, 27
— Piero di Cosimo de’, 46, 63, 69
— Piero di Lorenzo de’, 68, 125, 135, Oestereich G., 36
136 Otto of Freising, 22
— Tornabuoni Lucrezia de’, 152 Ottokar N., 3, 220
Meinecke F, 7
Melis F, 71 Padua, 18, 19
Meyer P.M., 25 Palmieri Matteo, 122, 186, 218
Migliorati Bartolomeo di ser Piero, 59 Pampaloni G., 11, 207, 208
Migliorelli Piero di Jacopo, 59 Panciatichi Giovanni, 57
Milan, 18, 33, 37, 44, 65, 67, 76, 88, Pandolfini, family, 60, 61
LOST RIMA Ri fem? 2 ONE 204 Pansini G., 224
Milo Y., 49 Parenti Piero, 125, 127, 131
Miniati Antonio di Berardo, 128 Paris, 32, 203, 206
Mirri M., 213 Parma , 195
Mondolfo R., 25 , Partner P., 194
Monselice, 18 Pazzi, family, 138, 145, 163, 186
Montagnana, 18 Pegolotti Lando, 109
Pellegrini FE, 5 Romano R., 39

Pericles, 21, 22 Rome, 20-23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 40, 41, 135,
Perrens ET., 5 177, 194
Perugia, 66, 201 Rondinelli Vieri di Andrea, 64
Peruzzi P., 221 Rossi F., 215
Pescia, 187 Rossi Matteo di ser Giovanni, 47, 49
Petralia G., 184, 187, 192 — family, 100
Pezzolo L., 172 Rostovtzeff M.I., 25
Piacenza, 195 Rubinstein N., 31-33, 44, 45, 164, 186
Piccamiglio Giovanni, 92 Rucellai Giovanni, 47, 50, 61
Piedmont, 40, 41 — family, 60, 66
Piero da Gagliano, 63
Piero Vannozzi Baronis, 109 Saitta A., 211
Pietribuoni Pietro, 52 Salutati Coluccio, 5-7
Piovano Arlotto, 48, 54 Salvadori P., 185
Pisa, 1219, 23, 24. Gil, CE INS. SIL Salvelli Francesco di Antonio, 155
IS, US) Salvemini G., 2, 3, 203, 205-209, 211-
Pistoia, 17, 57, 187 218921170220
Pitti Giovanni di Bonaccorso, 138 Salviati Alamanno, 66
— Lorenzo di Bonaccorso, 138 San Gimignano, 187
— family, 66, 187 San Piero a Quarachi, 50
Pius III (Francesco Piccolomini), papa, Sandro Cherichini, 109
135 Sanudo Marin, 67
Polanyi K., 28 Sapori 322162178223
Polidori L., 215 Sarpi Paolo, 198
Poliziano Angelo, 49, 53, 54 Savese di Francesco, 66
Polybius, 21 Savigny E.K. von, 25
Poppi, 23 Savoia Amedeo IX di, Duke of Savoy,
Portinari, family, 154 135
Prato, 17, 187 — Emanuele Filiberto di, Duke of Sa-
Pucci Antonio di Puccio, 143 voy, 38
— family, 60, 154 Savonarola Girolamo, 172
Scala Bartolomeo, 153
Quarata da, family, 60, 100 Scali Manetto, 55
Schiera P., 41
Raaflaub K., 15, 19, 21, 24 Scotland, 40
Rado A., 5 Sereni E., 214
Ragionieri E., 209-211 Serragli, family, 154
Remigio de’ Girolami, 22 Sestan E., 1,211
Ridolfi R., 129 Sforza Francesco, Duke of Milan, 44,
Ridolfi, family, 60 65, 67, 68, 186
Rinuccini Alamanno, 5, 125, 131, 185 — Ludovico (il Moro), Duke of Milan,
— Filippo, 46 JCOM75
Roberto da Gagliano, 67 Sicily, 36
Rodolico N., 215 Siena, 18, 94, 192, 204
Romagna, 17 Sieveking H., 81, 168, 204
INDEX 247
Sismondi J.C.L.S. des, 25 DS 47539. 40

Smith Adam, 28, 72 DS Set
Soderini Lorenzo di Tommaso, 84 Urbino Duke of see Montefeltro Fede-
— Tommaso, 56 rico da
nl 60-62, 66 Uzzano Niccolò da, 43
Solosmei Matteo di Nuccio, 63
Spain, 41, 165 Vecchietti Filippo di Ugo, 110
Spini Geri di Vanni, 110 Veneto, 23, 40
— Manetto di Vanni, 110 Venice, 18, 23-25, 27, 29, 36, 43, 45, 61,
Stefani Marchionne di Coppo, 55, 82, 0 Hil, 7D», VI A0 S022, 1).
83, 97, 110, 180 128 MS 7 76 L772 196:
Stolleis M., 166 204, 220
Strozzi Carlo, 55 Ventura A., 220
— Filippo di Matteo, 122 Ventura, family, 60
— Palla, 67 Vespucci Amerigo, notary, 59
— Selvaggia, 136 Veyne P, 37
Stumpo E., 193 , Vicenza, 18, 24
Sylverman S., 38 Villani Giovanni, 55, 97, 102, 110
Syme R.,. 7, 8 — Matteo, 55, 73, 74, 82, 83, 86, 97,
102, 110, 180
Tacitus, 21, 165 Vinci, 57
Tagliamillo Alessandro, 66 Violante C., 37, 204
— Niccolo, 66 Visconti, family, Dukes of Milan, 76
Talamone, 23 Vitelleschi Giovanni, 66
Terraferma Veneta, 24, 197, 200 Vivaldi Francesco, 79
Thucydides, 21 Vivarelli R., 204, 214
Tilly C., 166, 167, 169, 200 Volterra, 184
Tornabuoni Giovanni, 136
— Lorenzo di Giovanni, 134, 136-138 Waquet J.-C., 40
Trexler R., 7, 14, 33, 34 Washington D.C., 70
Troilo di Muro, 66 Weber M., 7, 19, 28, 167, 168, 171
Turkey, 173, 196 Weissman R., 7, 33-35, 49
Mascany,14, 175-23, 36; 40 171, 191;
1952201205 20014215 222 Zorzi A., 181, 185, 194
ws
5
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AO CHOEUR AURA RESP A -

1. Polis/Comune: Reflections on a Comparison ................

AT = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio delle Tratte

Places of Original Publication

Chapter 2: in Klientelsysteme im Europa der Friihen Neuzeit, Herausgegeben von

Chapter 4: in Italia 1350-1450: Tra crisi, trasformazione, svuluppo, Pistoia: Centro

Chapter 6: in I ceti dirigenti in Toscana nel Quattrocento, Florence, Papafava, 1987,

Chapter 7: in Rinascimento, 37, 1997, pp. 243-282.

organizers of conferences and seminars. In some other cases, the pieces

erations of historians: the city’s Archivio di Stato. This great institution,

In my dissertation, drawing mostly on legislative records (Provvisioni,

whose collectivity might be referred to as an oligarchy. I suggested this

riography, Namier and Syme pointed to an approach that I became increas-

of both. Chapter 8, below, represents such an effort: an attempt to capture,

I was writing my book on public finance, I had been able to formulate a

patrimonial strategies of families, and, quite amazingly, on its matrimonial

advance his own, private interests? Allegations about gross improprieties in

mulating strong generalizations about the past. Conti’s strong nominalist

Inevitably as one re-reads articles written as long as 30 years ago, one is

This volume’s opening essay reproduces the concluding reflections pre-

It is understandable, perhaps, if a student of medieval Italian history

' Grohmann (1981), II, 638.

4 Ventura (1979), I, 178-9.

Since the Middle Ages, we have become accustomed to separating and

the relationships of urban to rural regions — comparisons between these two

7 Thucydides (1900), 2, 34, 6.

19 Quoted in Rubinstein (1965), 55, n. 2.

| Finley (1983), 113-115.

rence. Yet, it is a mistake to ascribe the acquisition of these empires to the

2 Guicciardini (1951), 121.

àHartung et Mousnier (1955), IV, 3-55.

manipulation enabled the Medici to concentrate in their hands and those of

Florentines.® In vain will one look to Weissman’s book for an explanation

of the Florentine state as the «proverbial Leviathan», but could hardly

11 Weissmann (1966), 22-23.

fourteenth-fifteenth-century communes we encounter myriads of examples,

! Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ricordi, in Roscoe (1902), 426.

fragmentation of political power and the parallel survival, over so long a

about patronage finds its contradiction in another case». And Koenigs-

Cosimo de’ Medici’ political biography, at least in its basic outlines,

Venetian alliance, traditionally directed against the proverbial Florentine

Brucker (1969) contains a concise presentation of the author’s views.

ously prosopographic standards in her reconstruction of Florentine poli-

Modern historians readily acknowledge that Florentine society was

? Rinuccini (1840), XC refers to a government decree passed in February 1462/63 (dates

seventeenth century, «a society of orders, not one of classes», a suggestion

his farmhands. And though occasionally a studied jocularity insinuates itself

resented, it seems, a routine manifestation of tensions ubiquitous to the

Faced by their employers’ systematic oppression after 1382, the workers.

27 Monte Comune-Periodo repubblicano, no. provvisorio 1121 (Deliberazioni degli ufficiali

If the history of clientele groups in the Duecento and early Trecento

” Boissevain (1966), 19-33; the quotation comes from p. 19.

32 Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ashburnham, 1830, cassetta 3, no. 275: Donato Bellandi,

more often than not referred to by contemporaries as arzicizia, created in

dominated most gonfalons’s deliberations: the distribution of taxes among

4 Ibid., no. 331, Tommaso Soderini in Florence to Bartolomeo Cederni in Pisa, 22

Medici distinguished themselves as leading members of their gonfalon,

years.* Thus, Cosimo officially took over a responsibility which had

accepted by his hosts. Francesco Sforza’s fortunes depended to no small