History of Renaissance Italy

Though not politically unified, Italy underwent in the 14th and 15th centuries a profound transformation. The character of European civilization was changed in many respects during this period, but in very few places did the changes equal those in Italy. Italy was the land of opportunity. Political unrest, the riches in this hub of world trade, and its history finally gave rise to a ferment out of which rose the Renaissance, the rebirth of the civilization of Rome.

Growing wealth had created in Italy a society that was urban, highly literate, worldly in its interests and brilliantly creative. By the 13th century, Italy had already become the most literate society in the world. Cities dating from a Roman past, which had never completely died out, were revived as a result of the great rise in trade and industry. Furthermore, the quarrels between the emperors and popes had enabled the cities, by playing off one side against the other, to win freedom from outside foreign control. Except for the south, the cities began to dominate the countryside. The feudal lords had to renounce, in effect, their own way of life, if they were to participate in the intellectual and economic advantages offered by the cities.

Politically, however, feudal anarchy was replaced by chaos. Except for the southern kingdom of Naples, the Italian Peninsula was divided into a host of petty city-states that were almost completely independent of emperor and pope. Conquest and amalgamation took place, but many of the Italian cities were too evenly matched, and neither agreements nor force succeeded in unifying them. However, the sharp internal divisions within the cities and the need for presenting a unified front against outside enemies served to help bring on the end of many republican governments and to make easy the despots' rise to power. Men weary of instability sought or accepted the rise of these tyrants, who, though they ruled with the help of hired mercenaries (condottieri), nevertheless sought to win the respect and admiration of their people.

A marked expansion of the greater states at the expense of the lesser ones took place in this period, so that by 1494 only five great states and a few lesser ones remained of the scores of city-states that had dotted the map of Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance.

The duchy of Milan, the republics of Florence and Venice, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples were the most important entities in the Italian Peninsula. Under the leadership of the House of Sforza, Milan became one of the richest states in Italy, and a center of art and learning. The true artistic centre and birthplace of the Renaissance, however, was in Florence and central Italy.

Just as Milan dominated the Po Plain and the Alpine passes to northern Europe, so did Venice, built on lagoons, command the Adriatic Sea. Cut off from the mainland and the tangled feuds of Italian politics, Venice, through its geographical position, was the natural middleman in the trade between the East and Western Europe. Venice was ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy families who elected a doge, or president for life, who in turn ruled with the aid of a senate and a council of ten. By the treaty of 1454, signed with Milan, Venice's claim to a mainland state (Venetia) in eastern Lombardy and around the head of the Adriatic was recognized.

The city of Florence retained the appearances of a republican form of government, but frequent revolutions, party feuds, and control by an oligarchy consisting of a small group of wealthy families conditioned its inhabitants to accept, beginning in 1434, the rule of the Medici. The republican form of government was retained, but in reality Cosimo de' Medici and his successors ruled as despots. The high point was reached under Lorenzo the Magnificent (1469-1492). Poet, patron of art and learning, statesman, and diplomat, Lorenzo raised the Medici prestige to its zenith.

The Papal States, stretching across central Italy and including Romagna, which extended up the eastern coast almost to the borders of Venetia, was nominally ruled by the pope. Actually, the territory was not centralized, and numerous petty despots set up governments that were virtually independent. Many of the Renaissance popes were as worldly as the Italian princes and maintained luxurious courts. Nicholas V (1447-1455), who started the Vatican library, and Pius II (1458-1464) did much to help revive Classical learning. The high point of the Renaissance was reached under Julius II (1503-1513) and Leo X (1513-1521).

The kingdom of Naples included all of Italy south of the Papal States, although Sicily formed a separate kingdom. Naples was ruled by the French Angevin dynasty until the succession passed to Alfonso I of Naples in 1435. Under Alfonso's rule Naples experienced a period of prosperity and artistic brilliance, even though the political order remained different from the city-states of the north. In 1504 Naples was conquered by Spain and ceased to be an independent state for more than two centuries.

Renaissance Italy was sustained by and thrived upon a delicate balance of political and cultural forces successfully operating within a special context of European and global conditions. In the course of the 14th century and through the first half of the 15th century, Italy was divided into a number of independent states whose geographic position and historical development led to the crystallization of a political order that, in miniature, resembled the larger condition of Europe itself. Both economic and cultural elements tended to cut across the frontiers of the Italian states and thus made for a unique community of material interests and spiritual values among all Italians.

Dynastic, institutional and social factors, however, stood tenaciously in the way of converting that Italian community of culture into any kind of real political unity. As Machiavelli and a few other great minds of a later era of crisis were to point out, in that historical paradox lay both the splendor and the tragedy of Renaissance Italy. The downfall of the two great universal powers of the High Middle Ages, empire and papacy, created an opportunity for a succession of attempts from a variety of Italian quarters to impose sovereignty upon the rest of Italy.

For over a century (1305-1414) strenuous efforts were made from north, center, and south to realize some kind of Italian unity or at least to reduce the multiplicity of Italian states under a common political sovereignty. The most significant of these efforts were sponsored successively by Robert of Naples (1308-1343), Cola di Rienzo in Rome (1347-1354), Archbishop Giovanni Visconti from Milan (1349-1359), and Cardinal Egidio Albornoz from Rome (1352-1367).

The last two great attempts at unification from north and south respectively were led by Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan (1385-1402) and King Ladislas of Naples (1402-1414). In each case coalitions of other Italian forces banded under the banner of "the liberty of Italy" (la libertà d'Italia) successfully resisted the imposition of a single rule. For a generation after the fall of Gian Galeazzo and Ladislas a series of wars among the five greater Italian states succeeded only in revealing the impossibility of establishing a single indigenous mastery over Italy and the grave dangers from without to which all the Italian states were being equally exposed.

In the middle of the 15th century, Italy faced two new overriding facts of international life. In the west, across the Alps, the long, dreary feudal-dynastic European struggles, particularly the Anglo-French conflict, were coming to an end. A consequent reorganization of the monarchies into national and imperial states was foreseen. From the point of view of Italy, renewed intervention in Italian politics by the greater continental states of France, Spain, and Austria had to be expected. More immediately ominous was the rise on Italy's eastern Mediterranean and Adriatic flanks of the Ottoman Turkish power. The almost simultaneous fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the close of the Hundred Years' War spelled also the end of an Italian era.

Farsighted statesmen in each of the five great Italian states soon clearly understood that the long Italian civil war that had dragged on among themselves for over a generation had become a dangerous luxury they could no longer afford. Negotiations for peace were undertaken. Through the intervention of Cosimo de' Medici of Florence and Pope Nicholas V, the Doge of Venice (Francesco Foscari) and the new Duke of Milan (Francesco Sforza) sealed the peace among themselves at Lodi in April 1454. The great Peace of Lodi was soon converted into a general Italian pacification, indeed an embryonic federation, through the adherence of the king of Naples, Alfonso I, and eventually through the admission of the lesser Italian states. Under the presidency of the pope a "Holy League" of Italian states, known as the Italic League, arrested the conflicts within the Italian Peninsula and brought about a new, if very delicate, structure of peaceful coexistence. From a mere battle cry la libertà d'Italia had become an empirical political reality.

For some 40 years (1454-1494) Renaissance Italy enjoyed a general peace only occasionally broken by local disturbances. A flowering of the culture of the Renaissance as expressed in the arts and sciences, in humanism, and in philosophy coincided with this era of Italian peace. Until 1492 Lorenzo de' Medici acted as a sort of arbiter of Italian politics and steered Italy clear of entangling alliances with foreign European powers, which, he insisted, were now more than ever disposed toward asserting their "right" to intervene in Italian affairs. Within only two years of the death of Lorenzo, fear, ambition and egoism combined again to create a state of mutual suspicion in Italy among the rulers of the states and, worse still, revived the tendency toward invoking foreign "redeemers."

In 1494 Charles VIII of France assumed the mission of delivering Italy from its part-real, part-mythical troubles created by selfish princes, who were decried and condemned by the apocalyptic voice of Savonarola. Charles of France invaded Italy in 1494; this was followed by other invasions and a series of Italian wars that lasted through two generations to 1559. In 1527 Rome was sacked, and by the Treaty of Barcelona in 1529 the pope and Emperor Charles V came to terms; in the same year, by the Treaty of Cambrai, France relinquished its claims in Italy to Spain. As foreign rule came over Italy, the Italian Renaissance began to fade.