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History and Historiography _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en dubbelklik nul hierna en zet 2 auteursnamen neer op die plek met and): 0 _full_articletitle_deel (kopregel rechts, vul hierna in): Introduction _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Introduction 13 Introduction to Part 1 History and Historiography 1 History The so-called Italian Wars, which started in 1494 and continued until the mid- dle of the sixteenth century, not only marked the beginning of a time of crisis, but the end of the first period of the Medici rule over Florence. When the French king Charles VIII entered Tuscany on his march to the Kingdom of Na- ples, over which he aimed to re-establish French rule, Piero de Medici signed a treaty with him. The people of Florence then rejected the treaty and exiled Piero after a popular uprising. The Medici regime collapsed, but the popular government established in 1494 did not last long. Particularly controversial was the radical spirit of the institutional reforms inspired by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, which attracted a strong opposition from both the aris- tocracy and parts of the so-called popolo. Within three years, Savonarola had lost most of his support, and Pope Alexander VI threatened Florence with ex- communication if the city continued following him. In 1498, after Savonarola was declared a heretic, he was put on trial and burned at the stake. Internal conflict and the inability to prevent the disaggregation of territo- ries formerly controlled by the Florentine republic undermined the military capabilities of the newly established government. This was partly due to the historical deficiencies of the Italian Renaissance state system. By the mid- fourteenth century, many small cities and local lordships surrounding the main Italian towns had been incorporated into larger territorial states ruled by a dominant city such as Florence, Milan and Venice. These territories were governed as subject communities, without participation in the central govern- ment. In addition, in Florence the public debt system was operated on the ba- sis of redeemable government loans, the Monte comune, through a process that favored the financial aristocracy, which could lend on profitable terms.1 The problematic consequences of these contradictions emerged when Florence 1 See L. Marks, “La crisi finanziaria a Firenze dal 1494 al 1502,” Archivio Storico Italiano, CXII (1954), 40-72; A. Molho, “The State and Public finance: A Hypothesis based on the History of Late Medieval Florence,” The Journal of Modern History, 67, Supplement The origins of the State in Italy 1300-1600 (1995), 97-135; J. Barthas, “Machiavelli, from the Dieci to the Nove. A hypothesis based on the financial history of early modern Florence,” in From Florence to the Mediterranean and beyond: essays in honour of Anthony Molho, ed. by D. Ramada Curto et alia (Florence: Olschki, 2009): 147-166. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432000_003 14 Introduction To Part 1 faced another foreign invasion in 1512. In August, a Spanish army, supported by the Medici pope, entered Tuscany. The militia designed by the Florentine Secretary Niccolò Machiavelli was unable to offer effective resistance to the Spanish army, which sacked the nearby city of Prato. The Medici regime was restored by the Spaniards, with the ottimati of Florence favoring the Medici rule against the popolani.2 However, after fifteen years of Medici rule, the Republic had another come- back. In 1527, a newly formed popular government expelled the Medici from Florence. In 1526, the League of Cognac, led by the king of France and Pope Clement VII, was formed against Spain and Emperor Charles V. Because of the pope’s hostility to Charles, imperial troops laid siege to Rome in 1527. Before the peace was signed between Francis I and Charles V in 1529 (the Treaty of Cambrai, known as the Ladies’ Peace), news of the Roman siege brought po- litical turmoil to Florence, as the Medici pope Clement VII could no longer control Florence’s institutions. A new Signoria was established, and Medici agents and governors were banned or removed from Florentine institutions. This political experiment, generally known as the Last Florentine Republic, ended just three years later in 1530, after another long siege, this time by a coa- lition between the same Medici pope Clement VII and the imperial forces of Emperor Charles V. This episode, according to one strain of historiography, marks the end of the era of the republican city-states and the final victory of despotism in early modern Italy.3 In Florence, the Medici significantly trans- formed the communal constitution and turned the former republic into a prin- cipality. The fall of one of the last communal regimes changed the Italian peninsula’s military approach. Those regimes had tried to revitalize old communal militias by turning them into territorial militias and transforming their objectives and organization according to ongoing developments of military theory and prac- tice. Afterward, local militias flourished especially in ducal, princely or monar- chical regimes on the peninsula. In the story of the collapse of Republican institutions in Florence and Tuscany, however, the evolution of military prac- tice, technique and tactics was crucial, with Machiavelli’s military thinking playing a key role. 2 A useful summary of these events and their consequences can be found in J. Barthas, “Machiavelli,” International Encyclopedia of Political Science, ed by. B. Badie, D. Berg-Schlosser & L. Morlino (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2011), vol. 5, 1479-81. 3 On this topic, see P. Jones, “Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 15 (1965): 71-96..
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