UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Liberty and Empire in Florentine Renaissance Republicanism: from Salutati to Machiavelli A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Adam Woodhouse Mowl 2018 Ó Copyright by Adam Woodhouse Mowl 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Liberty and Empire in Florentine Renaissance Republicanism: from Salutati to Machiavelli by Adam Woodhouse Mowl Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Peter James Stacey, Chair This doctoral dissertation is concerned with a body of Renaissance republican thinking about empire that developed in Italy between c. 1375 and c. 1515. It shows that Renaissance humanists––intellectuals dedicated to restoring the cultural products of Greco-Roman antiquity– –drew from Roman sources a conceptual apparatus with which they described the Florentine Republic’s subjection of neighbouring peoples in terms that avoided the idea of slavery. I argue that of particular importance to this humanist ideological project was the Roman concept of the imperial protectorate: a vision of an empire formed between a patron state and its dependent, yet free, clients. Moreover, I find that Florentine humanists claimed that their republic could liberate foreign peoples from servitude, and thus export to them an accommodated version of republican ii freedom. After examining these earlier humanist approaches, this dissertation brings to light a radically divergent Renaissance conception of empire: Machiavelli’s theory of the imperial republic. I demonstrate that Machiavelli reappraises his humanist predecessors’ assumptions to produce a theory of empire which accepts that imperial rule almost invariably involves the domination and enslavement of foreign subjects. Altogether, this dissertation reveals that the Italian Renaissance transmits not only a range of Roman notions of empire as revived by early Florentine humanism, but also Machiavelli’s revisionist theory. This dual Renaissance legacy has implications for how we study later theorists who were heirs to the same problem of reconciling liberty and empire. iii The dissertation of Adam Woodhouse Mowl is approved. Andrea Moudarres Anthony R. Pagden Teofilo F. Ruiz Peter James Stacey, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv Contents Vita vi Introduction 1 1. Subjection without Servitude: The Renaissance of the Imperial 24 Protectorate 2. The Development of Humanist Imperial Thinking in Fifteenth-Century 64 Florence: Leonardo Bruni’s Historiae Florentini populi 3. Machiavelli’s Early Imperial Thinking, 1499–c. 1513 110 4. The Discorsi and Machiavelli’s Theory of Empire 167 Conclusion 253 Bibliography 261 v Adam Woodhouse Mowl I hold a BA in Ancient and Modern History from the University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College and an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of London. I have been a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and will soon be taking up a Harper-Schmidt fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies and the Journal of the History of Ideas. vi Introduction I. PROJECT DESCRIPTION When historians look for the origins of post-classical republicanism, they rightly turn to the city- states of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. None of these states has been more closely associated with the republican tradition than Florence. Yet the Florentine contribution to republican thought has been both simplified and, more troublingly, sanitized. While creating in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a territorial state in Tuscany, Florence absorbed into its expanding domains––sometimes by purchase, sometimes through conquest––other, formerly independent, republics. This imperial process inevitably engendered a profound ideological problem: how could Florence justify subjecting to its imperial rule neighbouring peoples who had their own proud histories of republican liberty? This doctoral dissertation offers some answers to this question. In doing so, it examines the Renaissance recovery of a set of classical Roman arguments and concepts that were used to help fashion the intellectual construct that J. G. A. Pocock has called the “imperial republic.”1 Pocock’s more recent work is part of a new seam of historiography which has exposed the omission or marginalization of empire in earlier studies of Renaissance republicanism, including 1 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 203–35. 1 those of Hans Baron and Quentin Skinner, the two dominant figures in the post-war literature.2 Pocock and other intellectual historians, such as Mikael Hörnqvist and David Armitage, are now demonstrating the extent to which the development of early modern republicanism, in its varying ideological forms and contextual settings, was conditioned by imperial concerns. That republicanism and empire should be conceptually intertwined in this period––or in fact in any other––should come as no surprise. For obvious linguistic and conceptual reasons, we must begin our genealogies of republican thought, not with the notionally self-sufficient Greek polis, but with the explicitly expansionist Roman res publica. Moreover, it is important to note that the concept of imperium––the power of command held by a Roman magistrate or, in a later semantic development, the geographical area in which such power was exercised––was itself a Roman Republican invention.3 The revival of a markedly imperial form of republicanism is nowhere more conspicuous in the Renaissance than in Florentine humanist political thought, from its earliest and explicitly neo-Roman incarnation in the works of Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni at the turn of the fourteenth century, up to Machiavelli’s theory of republican empire at the opening of the sixteenth. Over this long century, Florentine humanism was grappling with a series of issues of imperial governance which had been long in the making. Indeed, if we want to trace the origins of Florence’s imperial republicanism then we will need to go back as far as the twelfth century, and thus to the very beginnings of the Florentine commune. For once Florence had in practice 2 I describe in detail these historiographical developments and list the relevant bibliography in the following section. 3 For the definition of imperium, see John Richardson, The Language of Empire. Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2 succeeded in freeing itself from the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Emperors to emerge as an independent political entity, it would begin the slow process of cultivating its own imperial space.4 This dissertation does not deal with the older medieval claims of imperial overlordship advanced in the regnum Italicum by the Holy Roman Emperors and their advocates. These claims have already been studied extensively.5 Moreover, since they were designed to appeal to an audience broadly sympathetic to the idea of universal monarchy, they belong to a very different current of thought from the one under investigation here. My focus instead is on the emergence from this political context of a distinctive and in many ways antithetical imperial ideology, and one that was presented in a novel idiom: the neo-classical language of Petrarchan humanism. That is to say I am concerned with the means by which the humanist supporters of a republican state attempted to legitimate its imperial activity within an intellectual climate which for well over a millennium had subsumed the concept of empire under that of monarchy. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that all Florentine humanists were unwaveringly hostile to the emperors and their various interventions in the Italian peninsula’s politics; some of the most prominent humanists attached to the Florentine chancery, such as Salutati himself, could combine local republican commitments with support for what Alexander Lee has recently 4 Daniel Waley in his still authoritative study associates the beginnings of independent communal government with the presence of consuls, which Florence had from 1138. Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean, The Italian City- Republics (Oxford: Routledge, 2013) (first published 1969), 31–35. 5 This is a very large bibliography indeed, but key studies of the post-war period include: Walter Ullmann, “The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty,” English Historical Review 64/250 (1949): 1–33; Janet Nelson, “Kingship and Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 211–51; Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600. Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3 referred to as “the imperial ideal.”6 Nonetheless, this dissertation shows that Florentine humanism would soon come to sustain an imperial ideology of its own which effectively supplanted the figure of the emperor altogether. This development in Florentine political thought reflected profound changes in the republic’s standing in the foreign arena. In its external policy, the early Florentine commune was largely preoccupied with evading the juridical and military reach of the emperors,