6. Political History

Aurelio Musi

The “Neapolitan Nation” 1

“Neapolitan nation” is a recurrent expression in the historiography of the early modern Kingdom of . While offering a strong interpretive concept to understand the developments of several centuries, it can also acquire different meanings in various historical, political, and ideological contexts. The term has been in use since the beginning of Spanish rule in the kingdom, but it gained a precise meaning with the work of Angelo di Costanzo in the second half of the 16th century. This historian identified the aristocracy as the only collective subject capable of representing the interests and prerogatives of the entire kingdom to the Spanish sovereign, of insisting on the kingdom’s juridico-political autonomy, and of playing the role of the monarchy’s main partner. However, the scenario changes at the start of the following century. The consolidation of royal absolut- ism, the function of the kingdom within the Spanish imperial system, the strategies of integration and consensus adopted by the king and the viceroys, and the formalized power structure in Naples were the primary factors that led the great historian Giovanni Antonio Summonte, in his Historia della Città e Regno di Napoli [History of the City and ], to reflect upon the search for a delicate balance between the needs of royal absolutism and those of the kingdom’s autonomy. In his work, the term “Neapolitan nation” acquires an ethico-political meaning founded on the balance between centralization and autonomy and on the union and collaboration between nobility and people in the government of the capital city. The classical reference point was the confederation between ancient Naples and Rome; the political model was the so-called mixed government. The search for the capital’s political identity continued. At the start of the 18th century, Pietro Giannone, in his Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli

1 In the early modern period the term “Neapolitan” could refer to both the city and the kingdom that took its name from its capital; this is still true in modern historiography. All notes in this essay are the translator’s. 132 aurelio musi

[Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples] (1723), presented a new “national” jurisdictionalism (a strain of political thought emphasizing the autonomy of the secular state from church authority). It was at this point, with the end of the Spanish imperial system and the entry of the Kingdom of Naples in a new political system dominated by the Austrian Habsburgs, that Neapolitan national sentiment partially changed. This is largely owing to Giannone’s anti-papal thought and to the contribution of new studies of public law, which gave rise to an idea of “national com- munity,” as Lionardo Panzini wrote in the introduction to the Gravier edi- tion of Istoria civile (1770). The novelty of Giannone’s work consisted in his ability to see beyond the harmonious image of common law in order to develop a profound critique of a system of power by focusing on the right of asylum (which prohibited secular authorities from entering most ecclesiastic spaces), feudal jurisdiction, taxation, and the economic and material life of clergy members. Giannone also referred to the “national” tradition of Naples when he attacked the feudal vassalage of the Kingdom of Naples to the church and reclaimed the kingdom’s territorial integrity by defending state prerogatives. As a result, the model and the Ghibel- line myth of Emperor Frederick II (1198–1250) passed on to Neapolitan Enlightenment culture.2 For all these writers, the centrality of the city of Naples to the identity of the kingdom was an undisputed given. This remains true even when, at the end of the 18th century, Giuseppe Maria Galanti attacked the para- sitical relationship between capital and provinces and restated the old metaphor of a monstrous head (Naples) that exploited and consumed all the resources of its frail body (the provinces). At that point the possibility of forming a new and wider national sentiment emerged from the need to find a new balance between capital and provinces. Galanti focused on the new connection between a nation and its constitution; the two terms enlighten each other, since the nation could no longer be built on the primacy of the capital and the imbalance between Naples and the prov- inces; rather, it had to be built on a constitution which should ensure the balance and government of the kingdom’s territory, the construction of rules and laws well-suited to the kingdom’s material conditions, the

2 Ever since its foundation in 1130, the kingdom had been formally a vassal state to the papacy, a status which its rulers acknowledged until the late 18th century by annual gifts presented to the . The medieval Ghibellines supported the emperors in their power struggle with the papacy.