Part 25 (1/2)

-- 2

With Dante we are already in the fourteenth century, close upon Petrarch and Boccaccio; and already the whole course of political things is curving back to tyranny, for lack of faculty in the cities, placed as they were, to learn the lesson of politics. Their inhabitants could neither combine as federations to secure well-being for all of their own members, nor cease to combine as groups against each other. Always their one principle of union remained negative--animal hatred of city to city, of faction to faction. It is important then to seek for a clear notion of the forces which fostered mental life and popular prosperity alongside of influences which wrought for demoralisation and dissolution. Taking progress to consist on one hand in increase and diffusion of knowledge and art, and on the other in better distribution of wealth, we find that slavery, to begin with, was substantially extinguished in the time of conflict between cities, barons, and emperor.

Already in the fifth century the process had begun in Gaul. Guizot treats the change from slave to free labour as a mystery. ”Quand et comment il s'opera au sein du monde romain, je ne le sais pas; et personne, je crois, ne l'a decouvert; mais ... au commencement du Ve siecle, ce pas etait fait; il y avait, dans toutes les grandes villes de la Gaule, une cla.s.se a.s.sez nombreuse d'artisans libres; deja meme ils etaient const.i.tues en corporations.... La plupart des corporations, dont on a continue d'attribuer l'origine au moyen age, remontent, dans le midi de la Gaule surtout et en Italie, au monde romain” (_Civilisation en France_, i, 57). But a few pages before (p. 51) we are told that at the _end_ of the _fourth_ century free men commenced in crowds to seek the protection of powerful persons. On this we have the testimony of Salvian (_De gubernatione Dei_, lib. v). The solution seems to be that the ”freed” cla.s.s in the rural districts were the serfs of the glebe, who, as we have seen, were rapidly subst.i.tuted for slaves in Italy in the last age of the Empire; and that in the towns in the same way the crumbling upper cla.s.s slackened its hold on its slaves.

Both in town and country such detached poor folk would in time of trouble naturally seek the protection of powerful persons, thus preparing the way for feudalism.

At the same time the barbarian conquerors maintained slavery as a matter of course, so that in the transition period slaves were perhaps more numerous than ever before (cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat.

Christ._ 4th ed. ii, 45-46; Lecky, _European Morals_, ed. 1884, ii, 70). Whatever were the case in the earlier ages of barbarian irruption, it seems clear that during the Dark Ages the general tendency was to reduce ”small men” in general to a servile status, whether they were of the conquering or the conquered stock. Cp.

Guizot, _Essais_, as cited, pp. 161-72; _Civilisation_, iii, 172, 190-203 (lecons 7, 8). The different grades of _coloni_ and _servi_ tended to approximate to the same subjection in Europe as in the England of the twelfth century. But in France and Italy betterment seems to have set in about the eleventh century; and the famous ordinance of Louis the Fat in 1118 (given by Guizot, iii, 204) tells of a general movement, largely traceable to the Crusades, which in this connection wrought good for the tillers of the soil in the process of squandering the wealth of their masters. Cp.

Duruy, _Hist. de France_, ed. 1880, i, 291.

The process of causation is still somewhat obscure, and is further beclouded by _a priori_ views and prepossessions as to the part played by religion in the change. The fact that the Catholic Church everywhere, though the last to free her own slaves,[553] encouraged penitents to free theirs, is taken as a phenomenon of religion, though we have seen slavery of the worst description[554] flouris.h.i.+ng within the past century in a devoutly Protestant community. Pope Urban II actually reduced to slavery the wives of priests who refused to submit to the law of celibacy, handing them over to the n.o.bles or bishops.[555] The rational inference is that the motives in the medieval abandonment of slavery, as in its disuse towards the end of the Roman Empire, and as in its later re-establishments in Christian States, were economic--that (1) n.o.bles on the one hand and burghers on the other found it to their advantage to free their slaves for military purposes,[556] by way of getting money; (2) that the Church in the Dark Ages actually had to enrol many serfs as priests, the desire of freemen to escape military service by taking orders having made necessary a prohibitory law;[557]

and (3) that the Church further promoted the process,[558] especially during the crusading period, because a free laity was to her more profitable than one of slaves--as apart from her own serfs. Freemen could be made to pay clerical dues: slaves could not, save on a very small scale.

See Larroque, as cited, ch. ii. The claim of Guizot (_Essais_, p.

167; _Civ. en Europe_, lec. 6) that the religious character of most of the formulas of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt proves them to have had a specially Christian motive, is pure fallacy. Before Christianity the process of manumission was a religious solemnity, being commonly carried out in the pagan temples (cp. A. Calderini, _La manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia_, 1908, p. 96 _sq._), and there were myriads of freedmen. It appears from Cicero (_Philipp._ viii, 11, cited by Wallon, _Hist. de l'esclavage dans l'antiquite_, ii, 419) that a well-behaved slave might expect his liberty in six years. Among the acts of Constantine to establish Christianity was the transference of this function of manumission from the pagan temples to the churches. Thus Christianity took over the process, like the idea of ”natural equality” itself, from the pagans.

And the principle goes farther. In Adam Smith's not altogether coherent discussion of the general question,[559] the unprofitableness of slave labour in comparison with free is urged, probably rightly, as counting for much more than the alleged bull of Alexander III (12th century); while the interest of the sovereign as against the n.o.ble is noted as a further factor. As regards the ”love of domination” to which Smith attributes the slowness of slave-owners to see the inferiority of slave labour, it is to be remembered that the Roman slave-owner was fixed in his bias by the perpetual influx of captives and cheap slaves from the East; that this resource was lacking to the medieval Italians, who had to take the costly course of breeding most of their slaves; and that in such circ.u.mstances the concurrent pressure of all the other causes mentioned could very well suffice to make emanc.i.p.ation general.

While the lowest stratum of the people was thus being raised, the state of war was for a time comparatively harmless by reason of the primitiveness of the fighting. The cities were all alike walled, and incapable of capture in the then state of military technique;[560] so they had periodical conflicts[561] which often came to nothing, and involved no heavy outlay; even the long struggle with Barbarossa was much less vitally costly to the cities than to Germany. Frederick's eight variously devastating campaigns, ending in frustration, were the beginning of the medieval demoralisation of Germany,[562] to which such a policy meant retrogression in industry and agriculture; while the Lombards, traders and cultivators first, and soldiers only secondarily, rapidly made good all their heavy losses.

It was when the practice of war grew more and more systematic under Frederick II, and the policy of cities became more and more capricious for or against the Emperor, that their mutual animosities became more commonly savage. Thus we read that in 1250 ”the Parmesans were overthrown by the Cremonese, losing 3,000 men. The captives were bound in the gravel-pit near the Taro ... the whole population seemed to have been captured. The Cremonese tortured them shamefully, drawing their teeth and ramming toads into their mouths. The exiles from Parma were more cruel to their countrymen than the Cremonese were.”[563] And, indeed, the Parmesans a century before had burned Borgo San Donnino and led away all its inhabitants as prisoners.[564] Now the Cremonese threw into prison 1,575 of their Parmesan enemies; and when after a year the dungeons were thrown open, only 318 remained alive.[565] Thus civilisation in effect went backwards on several lines at once, the spirit of internecine strife growing step by step with the economic process under which the community divided into rich and poor, as formerly into n.o.ble and plebeian.

Up till the end of the thirteenth century, however, the growth of capital went on slowly,[566] and the division between rich and poor was not deep, the less so because thus far the middle and upper cla.s.ses held by the sentiment of civic patriotism to the extent of being ready to spend freely for civic purposes, while they spent little on themselves as compared with the rich of a later period. So that, although the republics were from the first, in differing degrees, aristocratic rather than democratic--the _popolo_ being the body of upper-cla.s.s and middle-cla.s.s citizens with the franchise, not the ma.s.s of the population--and though the workers had later to struggle for their political privileges very much as did the plebs of ancient Rome, the economic conditions were for a considerable period healthy enough. A rapid expansion of upper-cla.s.s wealth seems to have begun in the thirteenth century, in connection, apparently, with the new usury[567]

and the new monopolist commerce connected with the Crusades; and it is from this time that the economic conditions so markedly alter as to infect the political unity and independence of the republics without subst.i.tuting any ideal of a wider union.

Much of the wealth of Florence must in early republican times have been drawn from the agriculture of the surrounding plains, which had a large population. Machiavelli (_Istorie fiorentine_, 1. ii) states that when at the death of Frederick II the city reorganised its military, there were formed twenty companies in the town and sixty-six in the country. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 365.

Dante (_Paradiso_, xv, 97-129) pictures the Florentine upper cla.s.s as living frugally in the reign of Conrad III (d. 1152). Borghini and Giovanni Villani decide that the same standards still prevailed till the middle of the thirteenth century. (Cited by Villari, p.

200, and Testa, pp. 89-91: cp. Riccobaldi of Ferrara, there cited from Muratori; Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 293; Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 34; and Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 342-44.) If these testimonies can be in any degree trusted, the growth of wealth and luxury may be inferred to have taken place in part through the money-lending system developed by the Florentines in the period of the later Crusades, in part through the great commercial developments.

The wool-trade, in which Florentines soon surpa.s.sed Pisa by reason of their skill in dyeing, was a basis for capitalistic commerce, inasmuch as the wool they dyed and manufactured was mostly foreign, the Tuscan region being better suited for the growing of corn, wine, and olives than for pasture. Already in 1202 the Florentine wool trade had its consuls. (Villari puts these much earlier. He traces them in 1182, and thinks they were then long established.

_Two First Centuries_, pp. 124, 313.) Woollen-weaving was first noticeably improved by the lay order of the Umiliati at Milan about 1020; and this order was introduced about 1210 into Florence, where it received special privileges. Thenceforward the city became the great emporium for the finer cloths till the Flemings and English learned to compete. (Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, as cited, iii, 265-70.)

The silk manufacture, brought into Sicily from the islands of the Archipelago by Roger II in 1147, and carried north from Sicily in the reign of Frederick III, seems to have existed in Florence at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but to have flourished at first on a larger scale at Lucca, whence, on the sack of the town by Uguccioni della f.a.ggiola in 1315, most of the Lucchese manufacturers fled to Florence, taking their trade with them.

(Pignotti, iii, 273-74; Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 323.) Many had fled to Venice from the power of Castruccio Castracani, five years earlier. (Below, p. 243.) Being much more profitable than any other, by reason of the high prices, it seems to have speedily ranked as more aristocratic than the wool trade; and when that declined, the silk trade restored Florentine prosperity.

(Villari, as cited.)

The business of banking, again, must have been much developed before the Bardi and the Peruzzi could lend 1,500,000 florins to Edward III of England (G. Villani, xi, 88; xii, 54, 56; Gibbins, _History of Commerce_, 1891, pp. 47, 48; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 340. Pignotti, iii, 279, Eng. tr., estimates the sum lent as = 3,000,000 of modern money). This function, in turn, arose on the basis of commerce, and the _cambisti_ are subjects of legal regulation in Florence as early as 1299. (Pignotti, iii, 276.) On this line capitalism must have been developed greatly, till it became the preponderant power in the State. Even as the kings and tyrants were enabled, by borrowing from the bankers, to wage wars which otherwise might have been impossible to them, the republican statesman who could command the moneyed interest was destined to supersede the merely military tyrant. In Genoa the bankers coalesced in a corporation called the Bank of St. George, which controlled politics, traded, and even made conquests, thus giving a historic lead to the Bank of Amsterdam. (Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 341; J.T. Bent, _Genoa_, 1881, ch. ii.)

Summing up the industrial evolution, we note that about 1340 there were 200 cloth factories in Florence; and a century later 272, of which 83 made silk and cloth-of-gold. At the latter period there were 72 bankers or money-changers, 66 apothecary shops, 30 goldbeaters, and 44 of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewellers. The artisan population was estimated at 30,000; and gold currency at two millions of florins (Pignotti, iii, 290-91). Concerning Milan, it is recorded that in 1288, a generation after it had lost its liberties, it had a population of 200,000 (certainly an exaggeration), 13,000 houses, 600 notaries, 200 physicians, 80 schoolmasters, and 50 copyists of MSS. (Hallam, _Middle Ages_, i, 393, citing Galvaneus Flamma; cp. Ranke, _Latin and Teutonic Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 111.)

-- 3

We can now generalise, then, the conditions of the rise of the arts and sciences in medieval Italy. First we have seen commerce, handicraft, and architecture flourish in the new free cities, as they did at the same time in Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. In the south, again, in the Two Sicilies, under the reign of Frederick II, prosperous industry and commerce, in contact and rivalry with those of the Saracens, supplied a similar basis, though without yielding such remarkable fruits. There, however, on the stimulus of Saracen literature, occur the decided beginnings of a new literature, in a speech at once vernacular and courtly, as being accepted by the emperor and the aristocracy. The same conditions, indeed, had existed before Frederick, under the later Norman kings; and it is in Sicily about 1190 that we must date the oldest known verses in an Italian dialect.[568] Some of them refer to Saladin; and the connection between Italian and Arab literature goes deeper than that detail; for there is reason to suppose that in Europe the very use of rhyme, arising as it thus did in the sphere of Saracen culture-contact, derives from Saracen models.[569] In any case, the Moorish poetry certainly influenced the beginnings of the Italian and Spanish. About the same time, however, there occurs the important literary influence of the troubadours, radiating from Provence, where, again, the special source of fertilisation was the culture of the Moors.[570] The Provencal speech, developed in a more stable life,[571] took literary form before the Italian, and yielded a literature which was the most effective stimulus to that of Italy. And, broadly speaking, the troubadours stood socially for either the leisured upper cla.s.s or a cla.s.s which entertained and was supported by it.

Here, then, as regards imaginative and artistic literature, we find the beginnings made in the sphere of the beneficent prince or ”tyrant.” But, exactly as in Greece, it is only in the struggling and stimulating life of the free cities that there arises, after the period of primary song, the great reflective literature, the great art: and, furthermore, the pursuit of letters at the courts of the princes is itself a result of outside stimulus. It needed the ferment of Moorish culture--itself promoted by the special tolerance of the earlier Ommiades towards Jews and Christians--to produce the literary stir in Sicily and Provence.

Again, while the Provencal life, like the Moorish, included a remarkable development of free thought, the first great propagation of quasi-rational heresy in the south occurring in Provence, it was in the free Italian cities, where also many _Cathari_ and _Paterini_ were found for burning, that there arose the more general development of intelligence. That is to say, the intellectual climate, the mental atmosphere, in which great literature grows, is here as elsewhere found to be supplied by the ”free” State, in which men's wills and ideas clash and compromise.[572] In turbulent Florence of the thirteenth century was nourished the spirit of Dante. And it is with art as with literature.