Alfonso the Magnanimous
Alfonso earned his “magnanimous” nickname because he poured considerable resources into making Naples the capital of his Mediterranean territory, as well as a major humanist center. [72] During this time, humanists such as Jacopo Sannazaro were inspired by the beauty of the setting, the tangible links to the classical past, and the city’s status as a melting pot for intellectuals and artists from southern Italy and beyond. [73] In addition to his interests in building up Naples’ cultural capital, Alfonso also dedicated considerable effort to fortifying the city, sponsoring the construction a series of walls with the goal of protecting the city from invaders. [74]
In the middle of the 15th century, the population of Naples began to decline, but with increased land available, Naples started to expand in many of its agricultural endeavors, such as sheep farming and wool production. The region also started to increase production of its signature products, including tree crops such as wine, olive oil, fruits, and nuts. They began a healthy export trade to Rome, Sicily, Venice, Florence, and Genoa, which helped the local economy further expand. [75]
Upon Alfonso’s death, the kingdom passed to his illegitimate son, Ferrante, who ruled until 1494. This brought another transition, because the political situation resulted in the French Angevins, led by Charles VIII, marching into Naples and conquering it with little resistance. The Spanish decided to intercede in 1499, [76] and for several years the Spanish and French occupied southern Italy as they competed for supremacy. Eventually, the Spanish emerged victorious in 1503, and the Kingdom of Naples was given to Ferdinand and Isabella. During this time, Naples no longer had a monarchy in residence; instead, the city was governed by Spanish viceroys. [77]
Naples in the Early Modern Era
In the first decades of the 16th century, the population growth of Naples started to accelerate dramatically until it peaked in the first half of the 17th century. [78] Over the course of the 1500s, the city ballooned from 50,000 inhabitants to 200,000, making Naples by far the largest city in Italy and, along with Paris and London, one of the largest cities in Europe. Much of this population growth was due to migrations of the rural poor who flooded Naples because of the low price of bread and lower rate of taxation. They were followed by the elites of the provinces and the feudal nobles, who wanted to partake in the flourishing cultural activities, social life, and rich political opportunities the city now was able to offer. The Spanish also sent their merchants, diplomats, administrators, soldiers, and clerics, and they were joined by their Italian and European counterparts. Such was the cultural kaleidoscope of Naples in the 17th century that one administrator made the superlative claim that Naples “was the whole world.” [79]
Naturally, during this time Naples was a place rich in culture, where poetry, music, and philosophy flourished, and this rich cultural milieu did not develop in a vacuum. It was thanks to the relative stability in Naples at that time, when the Spanish Empire was enjoying a time of peace and Naples, as the largest city in the empire, enjoyed a special prestige. [80] The rule of the Spanish Hapsburgs over the kingdom remained secure despite the fact that the empire was in its waning period by the reign of King Charles II (1665-1700). [81]
In the late 16th century, several calamities piled atop one another and started to threaten the flourishing Neapolitan culture. While the Spanish government had already been warned in 1559 of the dangerously low morale of the Neapolitans that threatened their loyalty to the crown, [82] things only worsened in successive decades thanks to crop failures in 1585, famine in 1590-1593, bank failures in the 1590s, and a massive devastation of wool, cheese and meat due to a harsh winter in 1611-1612. In addition to the problems within the city, the Spanish Empire was being threatened by shifts in the European geopolitical climate. At the start of the 1590s, over the course of 18 months, the Vatican saw five different pontiffs take the mantle, France was starting to recover from a downturn, and the Ottoman Empire was hungrily expanding west during that same time. Neapolitan cultural production was able to resist this turmoil, but it would soon come to a point of decline.
In the early 1600s, Naples was a bustling, densely populated city and an active place of commerce with a robust military. Thanks to its strategic location in the central Mediterranean, its port facilitated the transport of merchants, ships, and galleons full of soldiers and slaves. Amongst the merchants who trafficked in the port of Naples during the 1600s, there were English, Greeks, Germans, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Genoese, Florentines and Venetians. [83] However, early 17th century Naples was also a fragmented society in which individual communities had their own religious and secular rulers, and this lack of unity meant that when a series of problematic circumstances piled up, society was ripe for a major transformation. A fiscal squeeze occurred in the 1630s and 1640s, Vesuvius erupted in 1631, a revolt transpired in 1647-48, [84] and a plague in 1656 killed about half its population. [85] As a result, by the middle of the 17th century, the city was a shadow of its former self. [86] In fact, it lost so many people during this time that it would not reach a similar population level until the late 18th century. [87]
The Renaissance in Italy is synonymous with advances in painting, and it should come as no surprise that Naples made important contributions to the history of art. Of course, its close connections to the Greek and Roman past, venerated during the Renaissance, made it an ideal place for artists to undertake their work.
Nonetheless, Naples’ role has been generally overlooked. Overshadowed by the monumental productions in Florence and Rome, Naples’ reputation also suffered because of the damage that occurred during war, both to the artworks themselves and to the archives that would have provided the information that would have allowed historians to bring them back into the public eye today. Furthermore, art historians have tended to be conditioned by the patronizing attitude of northern Italians who considered Naples and the south “backwards,” [88] and therefore viewed its cultural products as inferior and unworthy of study. [89]
Fortunately, there have been recent efforts to reassess the Neapolitan contribution to Italian and European art. [90] One of the most remarkable elements of Neapolitan art during its time under the Angevin and Aragonese rulers was the presence of artists not just from the rest of mainland Italy, but from Dalmatia, Provence, and Spain, as well as the production of architecture by Catalan. [91]
When Naples was the third largest city in Europe, its rich commercial activity was bolstered by a unique contribution of Neapolitan women. Although Neapolitan legal codes clearly privileged men over women in issues of succession and inheritance, they were inconsistently enforced, which meant that women did, in fact, inherit business licenses from their deceased husbands, if only ones that were small in scale. [92] In the late 1600s, Neapolitan women ran shops, bakeries, and grocery stores, and moreover, representations by Neapolitan artists at the time depict women in a number of different roles, both public and private. They show women leading aristocratic families, reading, and working.
One of the greatest Neapolitan artists worked during this period, and she was a woman. Indeed, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) is the most famous female Italian painter of all time. [93] Another great Italian writer, Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), although born in Rome, was able to find herself in Ischia, writing poetry as she presided over an influential literary court. [94]
Women from different backgrounds and classes in Naples participated in the life of the city in various ways. There were noblewomen who were able to lead their families and wield economic power; religious women who gained public visibility; upper class nuns who were responsible for conducting agreements between the church and state; intellectual women who played an important role in the salons of Naples and on the nearby island of Ischia, through their wit and conversation (and likely, good looks); lower class women who emigrated from the countryside and worked as domestic help in private households or in convents; women who bucked prevailing tendencies and managed to acquire bas
ic literacy skills; and women who became great collectors of art and cultural artifacts. [95]
The Enlightenment
During the Enlightenment, Naples was highly productive. No one doubted its geopolitical importance thanks to its rich natural resources and gentle climate, as well as its position on a European frontier that made it a political and religious outpost at the heart of the Mediterranean. [96] Nonetheless, French and British intellectuals readily complained that the cultural level of Naples did not live up to their respective capitals or even to Rome, and beliefs about the association between climate and temperament did not play out in the Neapolitans’ favor, insofar as heat was seen as creating a natural dispensation to laziness. [97] Neapolitan writers often found themselves needing to publish defenses of their culture, which was described by outsiders as decadent, backwards, lazy, and unoriginal (particularly in terms of copying the French). [98]
In 1707, the Austrian Hapsburgs interrupted Spanish rule for a brief period, but in 1734, the Spanish Bourbons retook control for the next quarter of a century, with Charles of Bourbon becoming King of the Two Sicilies. [99] The return of the monarch brought to an end a long two centuries during which Naples was governed by viceroys.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Charles came to the city, he was greeted with open arms, and not just by the nobility who obviously saw the potential for advancement thanks to their newfound proximity to the center of power. The administrative elites were excited about the prospect of increasing their power within the new state, and the masses hoped that the king would install favorable taxation policies that would save them money. There was also a hope that the presence of Charles of Bourbon would signal an end of the feudal hold that the papacy had long had over Naples, ever since the Norman King Roger took the throne in the late 11th century. If this did not offer a high enough set of expectations, the people looked to the new king to dramatically curtail the role of the church in Italian social and cultural life. [100]
The return of the monarch did serve to occasion a major shift, as much in terms of demographic and economic growth, as in terms of cultural and social life. Court life, presided over by the king, began to flourish once again, as the monarchy built new palaces, theaters, and other public buildings. The monarchy even sponsored artists, musicians, and scholars, and during this period, archeology began to develop as a discipline. In the 1730s and 1740s, the discoveries of the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, devastated by Vesuvius in 79 CE, gave the city a further set of attractions to lure visitors. In fact, until the revolutionary troubles began to impede leisure travel in the 1790s, the Bourbons were able to turn the city into a major stop on the northern European Grand Tour, as visitors streamed into town to take in its nature, museums, performances, archeological sites, volcanic activity, and even its notably lively street life. [101] Beyond their interest in the pleasures of Naples, visitors came at this time based on the generous opportunities for economic investment.
When the renowned writer Goethe arrived in Naples in early 1787, he brought with him the intersection of Enlightenment culture and that of Romanticism, and he acknowledged that he struggled to capture the mystery of the city with an objective eye. [102] As he put it, “Naples is, every where, beautiful and glorious.” [103] Goethe was mesmerized by Vesuvius, and in that sense he was hardly alone, as the volcano had already begun to attract the interest of all sorts of scholars, including alchemists, natural philosophers, and scientists. In this later period, it drew the fascination of Enlightenment thinkers, Romantic poets, and artists. [104] Marquis de Sade set a wildly provocative scene from his novel Juliette on the crater of Vesuvius, Nietzsche and Freud used Vesuvius as a symbol of angst, and later, the Surrealists relished using the metaphoric qualities of the volcano in their work. [105]
Goethe
For all the unquestionably positive elements of this period, they masked serious sociopolitical problems. Naples witnessed the powerful feudal class take advantage of the peasants, the wealthy and dominant church still curtailed certain activities, and the weak agricultural economy (trade and manufacturing was relatively minor and was controlled by foreigners and the monarchy) hurt the region. Naples also suffered under corrupt administration.
Due to these problems, the city was resistant to reform. Some Enlightenment writers who were more in tune with these problems and less prone to celebration saw the city as fragile, vividly depicting it as a giant head over a sickly body. [106]
Unification
As the winds of revolution blew through Europe, Naples entered what some have called its “tragic centuries” (which, these same people claim, are not yet over). [107] The tragic centuries started with a rather demoralizing event, when, in the wake of the French Revolution, the people of Naples declared the Parthenopean Republic, an echo of their Greek heritage. They managed to hold their independence for all of five months, from January to June, before King Ferdinand was able to reclaim the throne. [108]
This brief failed revolution represented just a fragment of time of these so-called tragic centuries, but it is nonetheless emblematic of what was deemed to be a “failed” societal redemption. [109] During this time, Naples appears to suffer an irresolvable paradox. On the one hand, it unquestionably faced economic and political decline, but on the other hand, it also managed to produce a dynamic, engaged intellectual life, including an exceptional artistic, literary, and urban culture that never lost a certain exuberant quality. While much has been said about the city by outsiders (and a great deal of it both patronizing and off the mark), Neapolitans are by no means ignorant to this phenomenon. Much of this cultural production, in fact, works to grapple with Naples as a paradox, and some of the most prominent intellectuals of Naples go so far as to define Neapolitanness as understanding the world as a state of paradox itself. [110]
A depiction of Naples during the Parthenopean Republic
In 1806, Napoleon and the French briefly took over, and though Napoleon never visited Naples, the city played an important part in the French imperial system as a source of raw material, money, and human labor. These they provided only in part because the Bourbon rulers and their British allies managed to hold onto Sicily, posing a threat to the French Empire on the mainland. [111]
Nonetheless, the Napoleonic government brought major changes to the city and the kingdom, especially in terms of its social and economic structure. For instance, it immediately struck down the feudal system, and the French also transformed the tax codes, judicial and administrative institutions, and used the French example as their example. [112] According to a writer at the time, the transformations Naples underwent during the Napoleonic period were “convulsions” that knew no parallel in history. [113] However, this period of reform was short-lived; when the French lost the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, control returned to the Spanish Bourbons, and the restoration brought a period of intellectual and cultural stagnation. Naples would suffer civic unrest until Italy was unified under Garibaldi. [114]
Although the French occupation was a blip, its legacy lived on, paradoxically enough, precisely because the reforms failed. According to historians over the past 200 years, the failures of these reforms to take hold provided some of the reasons Southern Italy was never able to embrace Western modernity. They argued that the Napoleonic rule of Naples was their chance to move closer to the political and cultural models of the most “advanced” European nations; having forever missed their chance, the south was now doomed to be backwards forever. [115] This perceived failure, referred to as the “passive revolution” by Vincenzo Cuoco, the city’s first historian, continues to haunt Naples to this day. [116]
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Naples was, until the unification of Italy, the largest territorial state in Italy. Its borders extended from the southern borders of the Lazio (the region of which Rome is the capital) and Marche, all the way to the Strait of Messina in Sicily. [117] Thus, it’s no surprise Naples would play a major role in the wars of independence that united Italy.
From the beginning, almost nothing went right. The “revolt” in Italy failed to catch fire, and the only reason war broke out at all is because the Austrians actually decided to flex their military muscle against Piedmont, thinking France would not defend its ally. Hostilities finally broke out in April 1859, but things only got worse when Napoleon III found out Piedmontese Prime Minister Cavour was actually plotting to annex part of the Papal States, betraying the terms of their agreement. Worse, he learned Prussia was planning to get involved in the conflict. As a result, without bothering to consult Cavour, Napoleon III signed an armistice with Austria. Per the terms of this agreement, Austria had to give up control of most of Lombardy to Piedmont, [118] but in exchange they were given the Veneto. The whole debacle was a humiliation for Cavour, who resigned in anger, but he would return to power once again in January 1860.
What the leaders could not have expected was that this manufactured conflict was actually the necessary precursor to Italian unification. [119] The so-called “Second War of Independence” ended up spurring a series of real patriotic uprisings in central Italy, starting in Tuscany and Romagna and then spreading to Umbria. Cavour tried to seize this opportunity to persuade the regions to agree to join with Piedmont, but he was rebuffed. On the balance, the fighting in 1859 did not go as Cavour had planned, but it did have the major advantage of helping him expand Piedmont. The concession of Nice and Savoy to France, however, was seen as a major loss, and even worse, Cavour gave Napoleon III these cities in a secret treaty which he himself believed was unconstitutional. [120]
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