The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  As a relation of the Angevins, Charles had a weak and generally dormant claim to the throne of Naples. But he was encouraged to revive it by Ludovico Sforza, the cultured and crafty ruler of Milan, and so the young king marched down the peninsula almost unopposed and occupied Naples. After an enthusiastic welcome from his new subjects, he enjoyed himself in the city, throwing banquets and tournaments. Yet Charles was too impatient and unintelligent for his popularity to last. As a French army sickened from its first experience of syphilis, he suddenly found himself opposed by a powerful coalition that included Venice, Mantua, Florence, the pope and Ludovico of Milan, who had changed sides. Charles made a run for the north in July 1495 but he was caught at Fornovo by an army of Venetians and Mantuans who outnumbered his diseased and decimated force by three to one. Since the French continued to retreat after the battle, the Italian forces contrived to claim a victory: their commander, the Gonzaga Lord of Mantua, even celebrated the event by building a ‘victory’ church in his capital and commissioning Mantegna to paint the Madonna della Vittoria. Yet everyone else realized that it had been a defeat, that the Italian casualties had been enormous and that the French had been allowed to escape almost unscathed when they should have been crushed.

  Luigi Barzini, a perceptive writer and journalist of the twentieth century, considered Fornovo a crucial moment in his country’s history:

  If the Italians had won, they would probably have discovered then the pride of being a united people, the self-confidence born of defending their common liberty and independence. Italy would have emerged as a reasonably respectable nation, capable of determining her own future, a country which adventurous foreigners would think twice before attacking. Nobody would have ventured lightly across the Alps, for fear of being destroyed. The European powers would have been discouraged from endlessly quarrelling over Italian politics and from cutting slices of Italian soil, with their defenceless and laborious inhabitants, in order to placate dynastic rivalries and satisfy everybody’s greed. The history of Italy, Europe, and the world would probably have taken different tacks. The Italian national character would have developed along different lines.2

  This is, of course, speculation, and it is difficult to agree with all of it. If the Battle of Legnano had not made a nation, why would a victory at Fornovo have done so? And who, apart perhaps from Machiavelli, wanted a nation anyway? Yet, as Barzini suggested, the annihilation of the French army might have discouraged later invasions. Charles’s uncontested march to Naples demonstrated, in the recent words of Giordano Bruno Guerri, that Italy ‘was a very easy land to conquer’.3 Certainly it encouraged the next French king, Louis XII, to emulate his predecessor in 1499, an invasion which, since he had a claim to the Milanese duchy, led to the overthrow and lasting incarceration of the unscrupulous Ludovico. It also spurred his successor, Francis I, to do the same, though his adventures in Italy ended in disaster when he was defeated and captured by the Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.

  The French invasions brought Spain into the northern half of the peninsula to engage in what was essentially a struggle for supremacy in western Europe. While the peoples of Italy naturally would have preferred this rivalry to have been contested across the Pyrenees, strategic considerations determined that the main battleground would be Lombardy because it lay between Naples, which the Emperor Charles had inherited through his Spanish mother, and the Low Countries and Germany, which had come to him through his Habsburg grandfather. The chief prize in the conflict was Milan, which oscillated between rule by the French and the Sforza until 1535, when, following the death of the last Sforza duke, Charles took control and gave it to his son Philip, the future Spanish king. Thus was the political and cultural independence of Milan extinguished as a consequence of Ludovico’s encouragement of Charles VIII’s aggression in Italy. The rest of the peninsula also suffered as a result of the French invasions: Venice had to fight its Cambrai War; Naples was seized by both the French and the Spanish; Florence went backwards and forwards between republicans and the Medici; and in 1527 Rome was sacked by an imperial army.

  As the historian Richard Mackenney has noted, the savage wars fought in Italy mainly by foreigners between 1494 and 1530 were the ‘one truly “Italian” experience’ of the age.4 Yet, like other foreign invasions over the following three centuries, they stimulated no Italian national response. Charles VIII may have been chased out of Italy in 1495, but many Italians had applauded and supported him the year before. Venetians and Mantuans may have fought together at Fornovo but at other times they were on opposing sides. Soldiers from Venice and elsewhere may have shouted ‘Italia! Italia!’ as they went into battle against a foreign enemy, but many Italians fought as allies of the foreigners without feeling guilty about betraying any ‘patria’. This was a phenomenon that survived into the 1860s.

  Scholars who have searched for signs of a nascent nationalism in the later Middle Ages have not been very successful: people in the peninsula may have thought of themselves as culturally Italian because they were wealthier and more artistic than anyone else, but they had no notion of a political or united Italy. Numerous historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both foreign and Italian, found it more rewarding to speculate about who had been the peninsula’s chief enemies, invariably awarding the prizes to Spain and Austria while remaining oblivious to the claims of France which, with its thousand-year history of invasion, was at least a plausible candidate. Writers lamented ‘the dead hand of Spain’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries just as they regretted ‘the dead hand of Austria’ in subsequent eras. Yet the governments of the Austrian Habsburgs were seldom inert, while the record of their Spanish cousins has been often distorted.

  Spanish hegemony on the Italian peninsula was confirmed in 1559 at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, at which the French renounced their claim to Milan, subsequently left Italy and spent the rest of the century fighting their religious wars. The native peoples were more forgiving towards their new Hispanic overlords than historians have been: they did not particularly resent their arrival and subsequently they welcomed the peace and stability that came with them. Prosperous times continued, and Italians remained the richest people in Europe. The most visible reminder of Spanish rule today is the centre of Naples, where Spanish viceroys built palaces, churches, a castle, the hillside district known as the Quartieri Spagnoli and the Via Toledo, which Stendhal considered to be ‘the busiest, most joyous thoroughfare in the entire universe’.5

  Italy in the seventeenth century has traditionally been regarded as weak, poor, decadent and oppressed. The view is partly true and partly exaggerated, but in any case these defects were not always the fault of the Spaniards. If the peninsula became increasingly rural, it was not because its rulers decreed so. Merchants could not be prevented from investing profits in land rather than trade; it was a trend in much of Europe in that era – and in other eras as well. Nor was Spain responsible for the war that broke out in 1613 and spawned other wars that lasted till 1659: the culpability lay with the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emanuel I, who like many of his lineage was intent on territorial aggrandizement. Perhaps Spain may be blamed more justly for supporting the intolerance and rigidity of the Church and the atrocities of the Inquisition, but popes not Spaniards prosecuted Galileo and burned the remarkable scientist and free-thinker Giordano Bruno.

  The Spanish have often been accused of ‘corrupting’, ‘provincializing’ and ‘hispanicizing’ southern Italy, introducing duelling and bullfighting and inciting local nobles to become obsessed with matters of status and protocol. Yet since the Lombards under Spanish rule were seldom attracted to these customs, the explanation may be that Sicilians and Neapolitans willingly embraced them. According to the historian Denis Mack Smith, ‘spagnolismo sometimes seemed to characterize the Sicilian ruled more than the Spanish rulers’.6 Sicilians often blamed Spain for their poverty and they rightly objected to the hated macinato, an inequitable tax on the grinding of corn.
Yet they made little effort themselves to become richer. Palermo was a parasite city where most of the nobles lived, far from their lands and farther from the desire to develop them. Spanish rulers were surprised by their laziness, their lack of interest in improving their latifondi, their failure to build provincial roads so that, as a result, the wheat their agents planned to export had to be transported on mules to the coasts. Yet the Spaniards, especially those from Castile and Andalusia, must have seen something of themselves in their Sicilian subjects. They also thought it more prestigious to acquire new estates than to improve existing ones; they too liked to petrify their incomes in palaces and religious buildings.

  ENLIGHTENED ITALY

  Naples and Sicily belonged to the Spanish Habsburgs until 1700, when the last member of that branch of the family died without choosing between French and Austrian claimants to his throne until the last moment, when he opted for Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. During the consequent War of the Spanish Succession, armies of both the Austrian emperor and the French prince occupied Sicily. At its end the Treaties of Utrecht (1713–14) confirmed the Bourbon contender as Philip V of Spain, but France’s military defeats by the Duke of Marlborough forced it to cede territory in North America to the British and to abandon those interests in Italy it might have inherited from the Spanish crown.

  After Utrecht Austria hoped to return to Sicily, but the British, illogically and incomprehensibly, persuaded its ally that the island should go to another friend in the recent war, Victor Amadeus, the ambitious ruler of Piedmont and Savoy, who now assumed the title King of Sicily. This was an unwise arrangement because no part of Italy is so unlike Sicily as Piedmont. Victor Amadeus sailed to Palermo in a British ship, the first monarch to visit the island since 1535 and the last to do so till the Bourbon Ferdinand IV fled there to escape the armies of revolutionary France. Coming from Piedmont, where the nobility had a tradition of military and state service, the new king could not understand why Sicilian aristocrats were so unwilling to be soldiers or administrators. He called their assembly in Palermo an ‘ice-cream parliament’ because eating ice-cream seemed to be its members’ most conspicuous activity. The nobles were equally contemptuous of this rustic-looking northerner and regretted the disappearance of Spain’s elegant and elaborate viceregal court. After attempting a few reforms, Victor Amadeus soon tired of trying to rule an ungrateful island from Turin and offered it to Austria provided he was compensated by somewhere else where he could be called a king; eventually he managed to get himself made King of Sardinia. Meanwhile a large Spanish force invaded Sicily, but its navy was destroyed by a British fleet while its army was defeated by Austrian troops coming across the Straits of Messina. The Treaty of The Hague in 1720 confirmed Sicily as a possession of the Austrians, who soon made themselves unpopular on the island by trying to reform institutions which the islanders did not wish to see reformed. In 1734 another Spanish attempt to seize Sicily succeeded, and the Bourbons thereafter ruled it until they were defeated by Garibaldi in 1860.

  Each change of Sicilian ruler between 1700 and 1734 was a consequence of a wider European conflict, of the contest between Habsburg emperors (Spanish and Austrian) and French monarchs (first Valois, then – in Spain as well as France – Bourbon) that had been dragging on for 200 years. In the process the chief antagonists altered Italian boundaries and dynasties, usually at treaties negotiated in the Netherlands, with no regard for the wishes or interests of the inhabitants. Sicilians could watch Spanish, Austrian or Piedmontese armies tramping over their island just as they could spy the British navy supporting one force or another off their coasts, yet they had no say in what might happen when the fighting was over.

  The rest of Italy was also affected by mysterious decisions taken in the north. Like the Medici in Tuscany, the Farnese in Parma died out in the 1730s through the failure of its last males to procreate. The succession correctly went to the last duke’s acquisitive niece, Elizabeth Farnese, although, as she was living in Madrid as Queen of Spain, the duchy was assigned to her son, Don Carlos, whom the European states had simultaneously selected to be the next Grand Duke of Tuscany. Rushing to Florence with an army ready to take over, the young Spanish prince displayed his life-long obsession with hunting by shooting arrows at the birds woven into the tapestries in the Pitti Palace. But Gian Gastone de’ Medici failed to die as soon as everyone expected, and, by the time he did expire, the War of the Polish Succession (1733–5) had upset all plans and altered Don Carlos’s ambitions. Now, at a moment of Austrian military weakness, Elizabeth Farnese revived Spanish claims to the crowns of Naples and Sicily and told her son to overrun those kingdoms, which he soon did. As Charles VII, he ruled in Naples from 1734 to 1759, when he succeeded his half-brother as Charles III of Spain, the nation he ruled until his death in 1788.

  After Charles had taken Naples from Austria, the vanquished power annexed Parma but was soon forced to return it to a Bourbon-Farnese ruler, Philip, a younger brother of the new Neapolitan king. A condition of European acceptance of Charles in Naples was the separation of the southern crowns from Spain, a proviso that later allowed his younger son Ferdinand to create his own dynasty in Naples. A similar condition was attached to the succession in Tuscany that finally settled on Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine, who had to be recompensed for the loss of his own duchy, given to ex-King Stanislaw of Poland, the loser in the War of the Polish Succession and the father-in-law of the French monarch Louis XV. Shortly before his death in 1737, the last Medici insisted that Tuscany must never form part of the Habsburg Empire whose heiress, Maria Theresa, was the wife of Francis Stephen. After yet another war over another succession (this time the Austrian), the long game of musical thrones was finally stopped in 1748 at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The peninsula remained dominated by foreign dynasties – the Bourbons in Parma and the south, the Habsburgs in Milan (since the War of the Spanish Succession) as well as Tuscany – but it had now achieved a certain equilibrium of power. A half-century of war was giving way to a half-century of peace.

  Aix-la-Chapelle was signed at a time when the ideas of the French philosophes and other writers of the Enlightenment were just beginning to percolate through the minds of Italian rulers and some of their subjects. People were coming to expect more from their monarch, not that he should share power with them but that he should act wisely, as a philosopher-king, educating his subjects, reining in the Church and the nobility, taking a leading part in promoting agriculture and trade. Thus arrived the era of ‘enlightened despotism’, a term applied to an age during which, at least in retrospect, the sovereigns of Europe are made to appear as if they had been competing hard to personify the notion: digging canals and draining marshes, constructing roads and abolishing tolls, reading Voltaire and Montesquieu before expelling the Jesuits and dissolving the monasteries – and all the time building an enlightened paradise with schools, hospitals, universities and academies.

  The prince most closely resembling the stereotype in Italy was the second son of Maria Theresa, Peter Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790. Intelligent and energetic, he was driven by the desire for reform in both economic and humanitarian affairs. He attacked monopolies and encouraged free trade, built roads and bridges, made taxes both lower and fairer, and reduced the public debt; he also made a valiant attempt to drain the Maremma’s marshes. In consultation with the Milanese writer Cesare Beccaria he drew up a penal code that made Tuscany the first state in Europe to abolish the death penalty and burn the gallows – a measure so audacious and encouraging to the cause of enlightenment that a Spanish reformer implored his own progressive sovereign to turn his eyes to Tuscany, to ‘reflect upon the mildness of the penalties’, upon ‘the small number of crimes’ committed there, and to ‘read over and over again the penal code’ of its prince.7 Among his other merits, Peter Leopold was conscientious and loyal to a state that had had no connection to either of his parents’ families before 1734. Although from 1770 he was heir to the im
perial throne in Vienna, the grand duke kept his father’s promise to defend the rights and maintain the autonomy of his duchy. In 1790 he became the penultimate Holy Roman emperor after the death of his brother, Joseph II, who was the greatest and most innovative of all enlightened monarchs, an emancipator of serfs as well as Jews, although unlike Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia he has not been known as ‘the Great’ – perhaps because at the end of his life he was defeated by the forces of Belgian conservatism. During his brief reign in Vienna, Leopold II (as Peter Leopold became) retained his reforming zeal, abolishing various punishments and ordering the police to be kind to prisoners; he even gave his subjects ‘something of the principle of habeas corpus’.8

  Enlightened despotism would not have lasted even without the French Revolution. The phrase is after all an oxymoron, though it seemed to make sense for half a century; ultimately, the ideas of the Enlightenment were bound to lead to demands for constitutional reform and the abolition of despots. Besides, however enlightened the rulers were, there was a limit to how despotic their behaviour could be, even without parliaments. Wherever reforms were attempted – in Florence, Milan, Naples or elsewhere – there were nobles and clerics always ready to dilute, delay and otherwise obstruct them.

  The first half of the eighteenth century had been a great age for Italian scholarship, a time when the peninsula housed some of Europe’s finest philosophers and historians, men of the stature of Giambattista Vico, Lodovico Muratori and Pietro Giannone. Later in the century, their followers flocked to the enlightened courts, especially to Florence, the favourite rallying-point for reformers from Spain as well as Italy. They were eager to advise and cooperate with rulers on practical projects and simultaneously to establish a peninsular intelligentsia that could function across Italy’s many boundaries, creating in the process what they hoped would be ‘a republic of letters’. This was a flourishing era for cultural and scientific academies and also for journals, which could disseminate ideas and discoveries beyond the frontiers.