The Revival of Italian Cities

Towns, Print and a New Sense of History

From the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, towns across many parts of Europe were growing, and a distinct ‘urban culture’ took shape within them. Townspeople increasingly thought of themselves as more ‘civilised’ than people who lived in the countryside, and certain towns — Florence, Venice and Rome above all — became genuine centres of art and learning, where the wealthy and the aristocratic patronised painters, sculptors and writers. The invention of printing in this same period meant that books and prints could now reach far more people, including those living in distant towns or even other countries.

This was also the period in which a distinct sense of history developed in Europe: people began to think of their own age as ‘modern’, and to contrast it deliberately with the ‘ancient’ world of the Greeks and Romans. Religion, too, came to be seen increasingly as something an individual could choose for themselves, as the Church’s earth-centred view of the universe was overturned by astronomers working out the true structure of the solar system, and as new geographical knowledge dismantled the old idea that the Mediterranean Sea sat at the centre of the world.

Because so much material survives from this period — documents, printed books, paintings, sculptures, buildings, even textiles, carefully preserved in archives, art galleries and museums across Europe and America — historians have been able to study it in unusual depth. It was historians writing from the nineteenth century onward who coined the term ‘Renaissance’ (literally, ‘rebirth’) to describe the cultural changes of this age. The scholar most closely associated with the idea was the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) of the University of Basle, a student of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. Ranke had taught that a historian’s central task was to write about states and politics using government papers and official files, but Burckhardt found this far too narrow — to him, history was as much about culture as about politics. In 1860 he published The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, in which he drew on literature, architecture and painting to tell the story of how a new ‘humanist’ culture had flowered in the towns of Italy between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. This culture, he argued, rested on a new belief: that the individual was capable of making his own decisions and developing his own abilities — a ‘modern’ outlook, in contrast to ‘medieval’ habits of mind that the Church had tightly controlled.

After the fall of the western Roman Empire, the towns that had once been political and cultural centres in Italy fell into ruin. There was no unified government in the peninsula. The Pope in Rome was sovereign only in his own state and was not a strong political figure. While western Europe was being reshaped by feudal bonds and unified under the Latin Church, eastern Europe was under the Byzantine Empire, and Islam was creating a common civilisation further west, Italy remained weak and fragmented.

Yet it was precisely these developments that helped in the revival of Italian culture. With the expansion of trade between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic countries, the ports on the Italian coast revived. From the twelfth century, as the Mongols opened up trade with China via the Silk Route, and as trade with western European countries also increased, Italian towns played a central role

. They no longer saw themselves as part of a powerful empire, but as independent city-states.

Two of these city-states — Florence and Venice — were republics, and many others were court-cities, ruled by princes. One of the most vibrant cities was Venice; another was Genoa.

These cities were different from other parts of Europe: the clergy were not politically dominant here, nor were there powerful feudal lords. Rich merchants and bankers actively participated in governing the city, and this helped the idea of citizenship to strike root. Even when these towns were ruled by military despots, the pride felt by the townspeople in being citizens did not weaken.

The book includes a passage from Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), writing about the democratic government of his city-state in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1534)

. He explains that the whole authority of the city lay in a council into which all gentlemen of the city, once past the age of 25, were admitted. He then gives an account of how the ancestors ordained that the common people should not be admitted into this company of citizens, in whose authority lay the whole power of the commonwealth. The reason given: many troubles and popular tumults arise in those cities whose government is swayed by the common people. Some were of the contrary opinion, deeming that the government should be defined by ability and abundance of riches. But the honest citizens, and those liberally brought up, often fall to poverty. Therefore the wise and prudent ancestors ordered that the definition of public rule should go by the nobility of lineage rather than by the estimation of wealth — yet with the proviso that men of chief and supreme nobility should not have this rule alone, for that would have been the power of a few rather than a commonwealth. Every other citizen, whosoever not ignobly born, was also included, so that all who were noble by birth, or ennobled by virtue, obtained this right of government.

The section also mentions a painting by G. Bellini, The Recovery of the Relic of the Holy Cross, painted in 1500 to recall an event of 1370, and set in fifteenth-century Venice.