elliott - reform and revolution in the early modern mezzogiorno

REVIEWARTICLE

REFORMANDREVOLUTION INTHEEARLYMODERNMEZZOGIORNO

Nearly fifty years have passed since Rosario Villari published Larivolta antispagnola a Napoli. In his foreword to the English trans-lation of 1993Peter Burke said of the book that it had establisheditself as a classic of modern Italian historical writing.1 TheNeapolitan revolt of 16478, whose origins Villari explored inthat volume, was one of Merrimans six contemporaneous revo-lutions2 and, as such, took its place alongside other Europeanupheavals of the 1640s as a manifestation of that general crisis ofthe seventeenth century which was the subject of such animateddebate in the pages of this journal.3 It also generated in these samepages amini-debate of its own, with Villari questioning aspects ofBurkes interpretation of the so-called revolt of Masaniello, andpointing out that Masaniello participated for only ten days (from7 to 16 July) in a revolution which lasted about nine months.4

Both Burke and Villari were agreed that, as Burke pointed out,the last word on the revolt of 1647 is very far from being said, inspite of the researches of Villari himself as well as those ofMichelangelo Schipa, his predecessor in the work of dispellingsome of the myths that had gathered around Masaniello and hisrise to fame.5 Villaris book stopped short at the revolt itself, andfrom the time of its publication hopes were expressed that theauthor would produce a sequel. More than forty years later we

1 Rosario Villari,La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli: le origini, 15851647 (Bari, 1967),trans. James Newell with the assistance of John A. Marino as The Revolt of Naples(Cambridge, 1993).

2 Roger Bigelow Merriman, Six Contemporaneous Revolutions (Oxford, 1938).3 For anthologies of contributions to this debate, see Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in

Europe, 15601660: Essays from Past and Present (London, 1965); Geoffrey Parker andLesleyM. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1978).

4 Peter Burke, The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello, Past andPresent, no. 99 (May 1983); Rosario Villari, Masaniello: Contemporary and RecentInterpretations, Past and Present, no. 108 (Aug. 1985); Peter Burke, Masaniello: AResponse,Past and Present, no. 114 (Feb. 1987).A revised and rather longer versionofVillaris article was published as Revolt of Naples, Afterword 1.

5 Burke, Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello, 3.

Past and Present, no. 224 (August 2014) The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2014

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are at last presented not exactly with the eagerly anticipatedsecond volume but with a massive new work, entitled Un sognodi liberta`, which incorporates The Revolt of Naples, although withimportant additions and revisions. It moves on, however, beyondthe concluding chapter entitled Anarchy in the original volume,to examine in some 250 new pages the rebellion and its outcome.The publication of Un sogno di liberta` therefore offers an unusualopportunity to follow the evolution of a historian and a subject.6

Like all good historical works,The Revolt of Naples reflected thehistoriographical priorities and the political and social concernsof the period in which it was published. In common with manyothers, Villari, a politically active Marxist, was preoccupied bythe social and economic problems of an underdeveloped ItalianMezzogiorno. He planned and wrote his book, which wasdesigned to shed light on the origins of those problems, in ahistorical climate heavily influenced by Fernand Braudel, withhis aspiration after total history, and in which, under the influ-ence of Marxist and marxisant historians, economic and socialexplanations tended to be paramount in the interpretation of pol-itical events. EricHobsbawms article in this journal in 19547 hadestablished the picture of the seventeenth century as one of gen-eral economic crisis, and it was around that crisis that much ofthe debate over the revolutions of the middle decades of theseventeenth century was conducted. The Revolt of Naples pickedupon these themes, andVillari acknowledged in thepreface to thefirst, 1967, edition of his book the stimulus he had received inparticular from the writings of Braudel and Hobsbawm; VicensVives and Chabod; Porshnev; Cipolla.8

The presence on this list of the names of Vicens Vives andChabod, both of whom had a deep interest in the history of thestate, is an early indication that Villari was far from being anexclusively social and economic historian. Much of The Revoltof Naples is concerned with the character and implications ofSpanish rule for the kingdom of Naples, and in that sense it

6 Rosario Villari, Un sogno di liberta`: Napoli nel declino di un impero, 15851648(Milan, 2012). This review article draws on an essay that I wrote for a volume pub-lished in Villaris honour, John H. Elliott, Naples in Context: The HistoricalContribution of Rosario Villari, in AlbertoMerola et al. (eds.), Storia sociale e politica:omaggio a Rosario Villari (Milan, 2007).

7 E. J. Hobsbawm, The General Crisis of the European Economy in theSeventeenth Century, Past and Present, no. 5 (May 1954); no. 6 (Nov. 1954).

8 Villari, Revolt of Naples, p. x.

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forms part of a long-standing debate among Italian historiansabout the allegedly negative character of the long period ofSpanish domination. But, while the book is primarily conceivedin terms of political and institutional history, the underlying storyis that of the devastating economic and social impact of Spainsexploitation of the viceroyaltys resources. These resources couldonly be extracted with the assistance of the Neapolitan nobility,and the concessions made for this purpose by the Crown to anunruly baronage resulted in a feudal reaction, or, in Villaris wordof choice at the time, the refeudalization of theNeapolitan coun-tryside. The feudal reaction in turn unleashed in the countrysidein 16478 amassive upheaval that he describes in the concludingparagraph of his book as essentially a peasantwar, the largest andmost dramatic in western Europe in the seventeenth century.9

Since the publication of The Revolt of Naples in 1967, otherhistorians, Italian and non-Italian, have made significantcontributions to our knowledge and understanding of Naplesand Neapolitan society in the viceregal period.10 In particularthey have come to appreciate that, as Villari demonstrated inThe Revolt, Neapolitan history in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies cannot properly be treated in isolation, but needs to berelated at every point to that of the Spanish monarchy as a whole.Neapolitan manpower and money were essential to the militaryeffectiveness and international standing of Spain, but, as Villarialso made clear, Naples under Spanish rule enjoyed elements ofautonomy, of which its nobility and its togati its juristbureau-crats were adept at taking advantage. As a result of the sub-stantial amount of newwork and new thinking of recent years, wenow possess a more sophisticated understanding of the workingsof the relationship between Naples and Spain than at the timewhenVillari first began his researches.Meanwhile, Villari himself

9 Ibid., 152.10 In recent years Italian historians have been joined by Spanish colleagues in the

reappraisal of the history of Spanish Naples. For a listing of their joint contributionssince 1994, see Aurelio Musi, Limpero dei vicere (Bologna, 2013), 734 n. 1. For auseful overviewof historical reinterpretations of theNeapolitanuprising as seen fromalate twentieth-century perspective, see Francesco Benigno, Specchi della rivoluzione:conflitto e identita` politica nellEuropa moderna (Rome, 1999), ch. 4.GiuseppeGalassostwo massive volumes Il regno di Napoli: il Mezzogiorno spagnolo, 14941622 (Turin,2005) and Il regno di Napoli: il Mezzogiorno spagnolo e austriaco, 16221734 (Turin,2006) constitute an admirable survey of the history of Naples set within a wider,Hispanic, context.

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has been publishing widely on a variety of historical periods andtopics, with some particularly notable contributions on seven-teenth-century political culture.11 Un sogno di liberta` can thereforebe seen as a continuation and enrichment of his earlier work on theorigins of theNeapolitan revolt, and as a summationof his ideas onthe subject after many years of investigation and reflection.One of the most striking differences between The Revolt and

Un sogno di liberta` is the dedication of considerably more space inthe latter to the revolt of the countryside. In a historiographydominated by the story of the tax revolt in the capital, far lessattention has been devoted to what was happening in 16478 inthe kingdom of Naples as a whole. Although the story of therural upheaval was sketched out in The Revolt, it now acquires along chapter to itself, under the title The Insurrection of theProvinces. There were twelve provinces in all in the kingdomofNaples, and this chapter is a novel and important contribution,based as it is on fresh research and bringing together much pre-viously scattered information to build up a coherent andplausiblereconstruction of the course of events across southern Italy. Theamount of space dedicated to the rural upheaval finds its justifi-cation in the thesis that informs Villaris general interpretation ofthe Neapolitan revolt: that the traditional depiction of the revoltas essentially an urban uprising in the city of Naples against thefruit excise (gabella della frutta), led by a deranged fish vendor,Masaniello, has concealed its true scope and meaning. This de-piction, he contends, was put about by the Spanish governmentand its partisans at the time of the revolt itself. Its effect was togloss over the uprisings in the kingdom as awhole, and promote anarrow reading of the revolt as the characteristic response of anuncontrollable urban mob to new taxes and rising prices. Thisofficial interpretation then passed into historical writing, leavingin the shade the political movements, institutional problems andsocial conflicts that determined the origins and development ofthe revolution.12 In other words, the image of the short-livedrevolutionary leader Masaniello, so powerful in the minds of his

11 Notably Rosario Villari, Elogio della dissimulazione: la lotta politica nel Seicento(Rome, 1987); Rosario Villari, Per il re o per la patria: la fedelta` nel Seicento con Ilcittadino fedele e altri scritti politici (Rome, 1994). For a comprehensive bibliographyof his publications, see Merola et al. (eds.), Storia sociale e politica, 1129.

12 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 274.




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contemporaries, also cast its spell over generations of historiansand continues to do so to this day.Placed alongside the urban uprising, the rural revolt, or

conjunction of local revolts, now appears as a much more wide-ranging and complex phenomenon than it appeared inThe Revolt.The passage in that book about this being an essentially peas-ant war has disappeared, as, for the most part, has the wordrefeudalization. Villari was criticized at the time of the originalpublication for the use of this word, although the realities thatprompted him to choose it remain unchanged, and he exposes asforcefully as ever the savage character of the exercise of baronialpower.13 Not all this power was traditional. The ranks of the oldfeudal nobility were swollen by recent recipients of domains,powers of jurisdiction and local dues alienated by the Crown incompensation for actual or anticipated services.In discussing the attitude and behaviour of the nobility, Villari

makes the important point that, in the kingdomofNaples at least,urbanization did not automatically lead, as it frequently did inother parts of Europe, to an enhancement of the power of thestate. Nor did it lead to any significant alteration in the relation-ship between the capital city and a countryside that continued tobe dominated by the barons and their bandit gangs. By the sametoken, however, their domination of the countryside gave thenobility no inducement to join forces with other social groupsin demanding a greater degree of autonomy or actual independ-ence from Spain. Viceroys were naturally aware of the social andpolitical dangers posed by the existence of an over-mighty nobil-ity. Yet, if this power undermined the power of the Crown, it alsogave Madrid an important long-term advantage. Neapolitannobles were perfectly aware of how much they had gained fromthe Crowns perennial shortage of money, and their politicalstance in the course of the revolt reflected this knowledge.14

If Villaris book provides new insights into the behaviour of thenobility, it is especially illuminating on the movement of ruralprotest to which that behaviour gave rise. The point of greatestnovelty here is the closeness of the relationship between the rural

13 Refeudalization appears as a subheading in Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 288. InVillari,Revolt of Naples, 2545 n. 131, the author discusses the objections to his choiceof the word, which led his critics to assume that he believed in a previous process ofdefeudalization.

14 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 2967, 275.




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and urban movements in 16478. In recent years historianshave examined theways inwhich newsletters and ephemeral pub-lications served to create a more informed public opinion in earlymodern societies,15 and news of events in the city of Naples wasquickly disseminated through the provinces, where local elites merchants, clerics, urban proprietors andmembers of the profes-sional classes seized the initiative and made contact with theleaders of the popular movement in the capital.16

The activities of these local elites, onwhichVillari casts a stronglight, tend to complicate and qualify the traditional picture of therevolt of the Mezzogiorno as simply a massive peasant uprisingagainst baronial abuses, as The Revolt seemed to suggest. Ratherthan being a society composed of little more than extortionatenobles and oppressed peasants, the kingdom of Naples includedsignificant urban groups drawn from the professional classes.Themembers of these groups were well informed both about the his-tory of Naples and about the contemporary world. A chroniclerobserved that every city in the kingdom could boast of havinghuomini letteratisimi who were active in the political and adminis-trative life of their communes. The communes, guided or led bythem and acting through local parliaments, chose delegations topresent in the capital what were effectively cahiers de doleances.Their cry was for liberta`, initially envisaged as the elimination ofbaronial abuses and a reversion to royal jurisdiction of lands andcommunes alienated by the Crown.17 In practice, as Villariwrites, this was a general mobilization of the provincial popula-tion that brought the relationship of feudalism and the state to thecentre of the realm. The leaders of the populace in the city ofNaples, by inviting and welcoming the provincial delegations,were in effect attempting to bring the whole kingdom togetherin a general programme of reform,18 although for this reader at

15 NoelMalcolm,Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years War: An UnknownTranslationbyThomasHobbes (Oxford,2007), 301,withauseful short bibliographyatn.1;BrendanDooley (ed.),The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneityin Early Modern Europe (Farnham, 2010). For examples from the British Isles, seeMichael Braddick, Gods Fury, Englands Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars(London, 2008). Villari remarks in Elogio della dissimulazione, 612, on the lack ofstudies of Italian broadsheets and pamphlets (most of which circulated in manuscriptform) compared with those available for other parts of Europe.

16 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 3501.17 Ibid., 373.18 Ibid., 356.




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least the extent of the identity between the aspirations of city andcountryside is difficult to assess. Fear must have been a dominantinitial reaction to the news from the capital and to outbreaks oflocal unrest. Communal governments were dominated by noblesand landowners,19 and if they initially found it expedient to goalong with the general demand for reform, their long-term con-cern was to protect their own economic and social interests. Thiswas an age of dissimulation, as Villari himself has reminded us,and the nobility of the kingdom, with a few exceptions, were, inhis words, uncontaminated by the separatist fever that grippedother European provinces of the Spanish monarchy.20

It is clear that Villaris new account of the Neapolitan insurrec-tion, while incorporating his reactions to the observations andfindings of his Italian colleagues and critics, represents awideningand deepening of his knowledge as a result of his own researchesin libraries and archives. But it may legitimately be asked how far,if at all, it reflects and illuminates the changes that have overtakenhistorical writing in the nearly fifty years since the publication ofhis Revolt of Naples. While the abandonment of the term refeu-dalization is clearly a response to his critics, the general outlinesof his interpretation are both implicit, and often explicit, in hisearlier account of the subject. Feudal power, and its extension as aconsequence of the massive exploitation of Neapolitan resourcesby the Spanish Crown, lie at the heart of his story now, as then.Yet in Un sogno di liberta` the balance of the story has shifted in

ways that reflect the wider historiographical changes of recentdecades. In this new account the economic and social emphasis,so strong in the Marxist and marxisant works of the 1950s and1960s, as also in the earliest discussions of the general crisis of theseventeenth century, remains as strong as ever. But the generalcrisis debate has moved on since the 1960s, in ways that reflectthe emergence of new historical themes and approaches.21 The1970s saw a reaction against the dominant economic and socialinterpretations of the past and a revisionist movement that would

19 Ibid., 3512.20 Villari, Elogio della dissimulazione; Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 275.21 For surveys of the debate and its development, see J.H. Elliott,Spain, Europe and

the Wider World, 15001800 (New Haven, 2009), ch. 3; AHR Forum, The GeneralCrisis of the SeventeenthCentury Revisited,American Historical Review, cxiii (2008);The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Journal ofInterdisciplinary History, xl, 2 (2009).




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seek to restore the primacy of political history. At the same time,the concept of compositemonarchy as an organizing principle forearly modern states did much to extend discussion beyond theconfines of narrowly conceived national history.22 Moreover, thelinguistic and cultural turn and the emergence of gender studieshave shifted the balance of interests in the community of histor-ians, while the rise of global and environmental history has nowadded a whole new dimension to old stories.23

Villari has kept abreast of these developments in his approach tothe past. In Un sogno di liberta` he draws attention to the participa-tion of women in the various movements of protest and revolt aparticipation extensive enough for the viceroy to find it necessaryto issue a prohibition on their inclusion in the delegations sent bythe provincial communes to the capital.24 The most significantchange between his earlier and his new reconstruction of therevolt is to be found, however, in the emphasis now placed onthe political environment of the Spanish monarchy and the polit-ical culture that informed the programme of the rebels andreformers. Villari always displayed an interest in these themes,but, in tune with the historiographical changes of the past fewdecades, social and economic interpretations of the revolt haveyielded ground in his writing to the political and intellectual.In line with this evolution of his interests, the story of reform

and attempted reform becomes central to the book as a whole,and it is for the protagonists of reform, whether they came fromMadrid or from Naples itself, that his strongest sympathies arereserved. He is particularly sympathetic to reforming, or would-be reforming, viceroys, most notably the great duke of Osuna,viceroy from 1616 to 1620, who was determined to curb thepower of the nobility, in part by giving the popolo a greater sayin the political equation. He is also sympathetic to the duke ofMedina de las Torres, viceroy from 1637 to 1644, the periodwhen Spains war with France was reaching its climax and the

22 For composite monarchy, see J. H. Elliott, A Europe of CompositeMonarchies, Past and Present, no. 137 (Nov. 1992), repr. in Elliott, Spain, Europeand the Wider World, ch. 1.

23 For the impact of climatic and environmental change on the seventeenth-centuryEuropean and non-European world, see Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, ClimateChange and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013); chapter 14of this impressivework tells the story of theNeapolitan revolt, and speaks of the impactof the poor grain harvests of 1647 and 1648 on the fortunes of the young republic.

24 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 362, 357.




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Spanish monarchy faced possible disintegration, following therevolts of Catalonia and Portugal in 1640. But if the book has ahero, it is the Neapolitan lawyer Giulio Genoino, who, althoughalready prominent in The Revolt, never really comes into his ownin that book because it stops on the threshold of revolution.Genoino has always attracted the attention and interest of his-

torians of the revolt, but Villari gives us a vivid sense of the manhimself and his activities, from May 1619, when, as Eletto delpopolo, he appears officially on the political scene and makescommon causewithOsuna until 1647, when, now in his eightiethyear, he is taken into custody by the viceroy, allegedly for his ownprotection, and dies in Menorca in January 1648, en route forexile in Spain. Little is known about Genoinos intellectual back-ground and formation, but he emerges in Villaris book as thelifelong champion of a programme of monarchical reform.Like the early Tommaso Campanella he has no thought of inde-pendence from Spain, but sees the kingdom of Naples as an in-tegral part of the composite Spanish monarchy. His vision is of areformed capital and kingdom, in which the power of the Crownis more effectively exercised in the interests of the population as awhole, social justice is upheld, and greater popular representationin city government restores an alleged historical balance betweennobility and people that in recent times had been heavily tilted infavour of the nobility. Genoino, as presented by Villari, remainstrue to this ideal of moderate reform throughout his life, acting asan intermediary between the viceroy and the leaders of the popu-lar uprising, providing the rebels with a coherent programme ofdemands, and linking the urban and rural movements of protest.Villari traces the ideal ofmoderate monarchical reform back to

the later sixteenth century, and to contemporaneous historicalwriting designed to prove the existence of a democratic medievalNaples, a semi-autonomous city and kingdom in which the so-cial balance was maintained by a parity of political representationbetween nobility and people. One of the most influentialproductions of this historical movement was the History of theCity and Kingdom of Naples,25 the work of the late sixteenth- andearly seventeenth-centuryhistorianGiovanniAntonioSummonte.Under the influence of this and other writings, Neapolitan rebels

25 Giovanni Antonio Summonte, Historia della citta` e regno di Napoli, 4 vols.(16012, 16403).




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and reformers, like those of the Netherlands in the 1560s or theirEuropean counterparts in the upheavals of the 1640s, sought tolegitimize their activities by appeals to the past and the deploymentof constitutionalist arguments drawn froma semi-mythical history.Genoinos constitutionalist reformmovement, however, with its

demand for parity of representation for the people, fell victim tofactional and personal feuds, the strength of passion on both sides,and the determination of the nobility and Crown alike to restoretheir shaken authority. Villari shows in close detail how, under thepressure of events, the programme of constitutional reform underthe auspices of the Spanish monarchy was swept aside by a move-ment in favour of an independent republic. It is illuminating to seehow, as happened in other seventeenth-century societies, theDutch example served as an inspiration to the rebels andreformers. The revolt of the Netherlands and the triumphantemergenceof theDutchRepublicdidmuch tomake independencefrom Spain a thinkable proposition for Neapolitans.26 Many ofthem had seen something of the Netherlands for themselveswhen serving as soldiers in Spains army of Flanders, while mem-bers of the elite are likely to have been well acquainted withCardinal Bentivoglios History of the Wars of Flanders and hisRelations of the United Provinces of Flanders.27

As Villari points out, Bentivoglios work contained numerousreferences to liberty and the love of liberty, which he depictedboth as natural to the inhabitants of the Netherlands andas the fundamental reason for the ability of the Dutch tobreak free from foreign domination and transform their nativeland from one inhabited by simple fishermen into a new centreof economic and political power. The lesson of the Netherlandshad recently been reinforced by the Catalan and Portugueserevolts. If the Dutch, the Catalans and the Portuguese couldthrow off the shackles of Spain, why could not Neapolitans dothe same? Revolution was contagious, as Merriman suggested,and as the debate over the general crisis makes clear.The imitation of Catalonia and Portugal, however, was no

guarantee of success. Both needed outside help to sustaintheir revolts. Like the Catalans seven years earlier, the

26 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 4947.27 Guido Bentivoglio, Della guerra di Fiandra (16329) and Relatione delle provincie

unite (1611), of which new editions were published in Italy and elsewhere between1629 and 1647.




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Neapolitan rebels, faced by the prospect of a Spanish reconquest,turned to the French for assistance, only to find that, in spite of(and partly because of) the intervention of the maverick duke ofGuise, the French were unable to save them.In constructing his analysis of the failure of the revolt, as in his

exploration of its origins, Villari consistently looks to the interna-

tional, andmore specifically to the Spanish, context for a story that

has all too often been confined to the city of Naples and its king-

dom. He shows in particular how closely the fortunes of Naples

were shaped by the fluctuating fortunes of Spain itself, and its

waning international power. There was a continuous interaction

between Naples and Madrid, which sometimes assumed unex-

pected forms. Un Sogno, for instance, contains an entire chapter,which is not to be found in The Revolt, on the marriage in 1636 ofthe newly appointed viceroy, the duke of Medina de las Torres, to

one of the most eligible brides in Europe, the Neapolitan Anna

Carafa, princess of Stigliano. Medinas first wife, who had died in

childbirth, was the daughter of the count-duke ofOlivares, and his

former father-in-law seems to have been taken aback by a decisionwhich had obvious implications for the relationship between the

viceroy and the Neapolitan nobility. The marriage, as Villari

shows, overshadowed Medinas tenure of power.TheMedinaStiglianomarriage is not an immediately obvious

episode for inclusion in accounts of the origins of the revolt of

Naples, and its presence here testifies to the breadth of Villaris

approach.While the general outlines of the story he tells may well

be familiar, he has given it greater range and depth than it has

previously been accorded, andhas analysedwith subtlety and skill

the complexities of a highly complex movement from its early

origins to its final collapse. His book has a strong cultural com-

ponent, at least where political culture is concerned. Some read-

ers, however, may regret that he has little to say about symbolic

representations of royal and viceregal power or rituals of popular

protest, like those discussed by Peter Burke in his article on the

Virgin of the Carmine. The influence of symbolic anthropology

and the impact of the New Cultural History have enabled histor-

ians in recent years to gainnew insights into theworkings of power

and protest in early modern societies. Their absence here maygive the impression that Un Sogno is cast in a rather traditionalmode, and indeed this would hardly be surprising of a work that




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incorporates, even if in revised form, a book originally published

in 1957.28

This surface impression, however, belies the value and import-ance of Villaris achievement. What he has done is to trace, inimpressive detail and bymeans of a brilliantly sustained historicalnarrative, the complicated interplaybetween amovement, similarto that found in other mid seventeenth-century revolts, for mod-erate reform within a traditional political and social framework,and amore radicalmovement of protest that gathered force underthe pressure of events and swept its supporters along into un-charted and increasingly dangerous waters. Revolution replacedreform, and revolution, in turn, led to savage repression. Thetragedy of the revolt of Naples is that, caught between the deter-mination of the Spanish Crown to reassert its authority by forceand the determination of an unruly and irresponsible nobilityto cling to its power and privileges, neither moderate reformnor radical revolution appear, in the light of Villaris analysis, tohave had any realistic chance of success. This was, and remained,a deeply fractured society.Villaris book, written with the heart as well as the head,

impressively demonstrates the extent of the tragedy. The greatuprising of 16478 may have put a brake on Spanish fiscalismin the second half of the seventeenth century, but in the end, asVillari shows, neither the revolt nor its failure did anything tosolve the eternal problems of the Mezzogiorno. If anything,they aggravated them. The great revolt of the countryside, fol-lowing hard on the heels of Masaniellos assassination in July1647, developed into a savage round of violence and counter-violence. Rebels hunted down their baronial oppressors andtheir agents and clients. For their part the barons, infuriatedby the concessions to popular demands made by a weakenedviceroy, turned on the reformist leaders and the instigators ofrural revolt, butchering andmassacringwith abandon.Thepopu-lace responded in kind, only to be confronted, as the balance of

28 For recent works on the rituals of power and protest in viceregal Naples, seeGabriel Guarino, Representing the Kings Splendour: Communication and Reception ofSymbolic Forms of Power in Viceregal Naples (Manchester, 2010); John A. Marino,Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore, 2011). It shouldbe pointed out, however, that inRevolt of Naples, 236, Villari described and discussedthe ritual involved in a lynching that occurred in a previous revolt, that of 1585.




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power tilted in favour of theCrown, by awave of brutal repressionconducted by royal and baronial troops.29

It is to be regretted that Villari does not tell us something of theaftermath to the horrifying events that he depicts so vividly, orexplore their long-term implications for the Mezzogiorno. As heindicates at one point,many of themore cultivatedmembers of thelocal elites were persecuted and slaughtered for their participationin the revolt.30 What were the consequences for the kingdom ofNaples of the suppression or elimination of what appears to havebeen the most dynamic and creative sector of Neapolitan society?Thehistory ofNaples in the secondhalf of the seventeenth centuryreveals a kingdom condemned to decades of political and eco-nomic stagnation. Although, thanks in particular to the activitiesof the capitals academies, there was a limited but significant intel-lectual stirring in the last quarter of the century, post-revoltNapleslacked the innovators and creative thinkers capable of realizing thehopes nurtured by the generation of the 1640s of transformingtheir patria into a second Dutch Republic.31

Reformist hopes revived briefly when the War of the SpanishSuccession on the death of Carlos II of Spain in 1700 broughtabout the replacement of Spanish by Austrian dominion. But itwas only after the kingdom unexpectedly acquired independencefrom foreign rule in 1734 and secured its own monarch in theperson of Carlo Borbone (the future reforming monarch CharlesIII of Spain) that Genoinos moderate and monarchical reformprogramme once again became a feasible proposition. Shortlyafter the coming of independence a young lawyer, GiovanniPallante, saw in the turn of events, as Genoino had seen almosta century before him, an opportunity for the reform of the king-doms institutions and its economic life. Like the reformers of the1640s he too believed thatNaples had the location, resources andpeople to make it worth fifty Dutch Republics.32

The short-term legacy of the great uprising of 16478 was inlarge part tragic, andVillaris book beautifully analyses the causes

29 Villari, Un sogno di liberta`, 506.30 Ibid., 351.31 See the panoramic survey of Naples and Neapolitan society in the years up to

1700 in John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples,16801760 (Cambridge, 2005), 7083; for the academies and intellectual life, seeibid., 1019.

32 Ibid., 333.




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of the tragedy and explains its character. But the great revolt somuch more than simply Masaniellos revolt left a longer-termlegacy in the form of a host of memories that would simultan-eously haunt and inspire succeeding generations. Even more im-portantly, however, it left themwith thedream that gives this bookits title: the dream of liberty.

Oriel College, Oxford J. H. Elliott




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elliott - reform and revolution in the early modern mezzogiorno

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