the image of tyranny in early fourteenth-century italian historical writing

Renaissance Studies Yol. 7 No. 4

The image of tyranny in early f o urt e en t h - cent ury It a 1 ian h ist o rica L writing

LOUIS GREEN

The relationship between ideals of civic liberty animating the communes of late medieval Italy and their theoretical expression in pre-humanist and humanist thought has been explored in Quentin Skinner’s Founda- tions of Modem Political Thought,‘ a particular merit of which has been the effectiveness with which it places ideas in their historical context. The main focus of Skinner’s inquiry, in that work, was the republican culture of cities such as Florence, but he also considered the impact which the rise of despotism had upon the political outlook and social climate of the times, concentrating especially on the influence the fear of tyranny had upon the surviving self-governing communities of northern and central Italy.* It will be my aim to complement what he has said about the effects which the seigneurial regimes had upon the political consciousness of early fourteenth-century Italy by considering how they were regarded in the chronicles of the period. My use of these sources has to some extent been anticipated by Quentin Skinner who has exploited the historical writings of Mussato and Ferreti,’ for instance, in his account of responses to the rise of tyranny in northern Italy. I intend, however, to explore this chronicle literature more widely than he was able to do in a necessarily cursory survey of the background to political thought and to place what it had to say about the relatively new phenomenon of despotism in the context, less of republican reactions to it than of the image projected in these works of seigneurial government in the successive stages of its development.

My reason for choosing historical narratives rather than political treatises as the basis of this study is partly that, until the composition of Bartolus of Sassoferrato’s De tyranno, little account was taken in theoretical writings on politics of the new signonk, even though the subject of tyrannical rule as such had figured in the treatises on government by authors, such as John of Salisbury and St Thomas Aquinas who had been concerned essentially with the misuse of monarchical authority. The evidence of chronicles is, furthermore, particularly useful in that they

’ Q. Skinner The Foundations of Modem Political Thought. I . The Renairsance (Cambridge.

‘ Ibid. 29-8. ’ 1978). 7-8, 41 -8.

Ibid. 25-6 , 38-9, 41, 43-4.

0 1993 The Societv for Renairtance Studies, Oxford University Press

336 Louis Green

directly reflect changes in the nature of despotic regimes and in the way these were perceived, at a time when they were not static entities but responding, in their institutional structures, to altering circumstances which in turn came to influence the manner in which they were regarded.

Traditionally, the rise of the signon'e has been explained in terms of the decline of the commune^,^ perhaps as a result of the impact on late nineteenth-century historiography of the Risorgimento with its tendency to present constitutional government as natural to the original state of Italian society and its decay in the later Middle Ages as an aberration. While more recently it has been acknowledged that, by the Renaissance, seigneurial regimes had become the norm rather than the exception, at least in northern Italy, their emergence is still seen very much as the outcome of the internal conflicts that plagued the communes in the thirteenth century. Although, however, factional divisions undoubtedly set in train the process by which the head of a victorious party established his authority and that of his family in these strife-tom communities, the consolidation of the hereditary principalities their descendants established during the early Trecento was due to wider charges affecting politics in the northern half of the Italian peninsula. The stabilization of governments at this period was to a large extent a by-product of the replacement of small independent city-states by regional ones. This, as I have argued elsewhere,$ issued from the substitution of citizen armies by bodies of professional troops, viable numbers of which could only be afforded by a combination of several cities. While this development favoured all large states, whether despotic or republican, in fact it was only the richest of the communes such as Florence that could benefit from it by transform- ing themselves into imperial powers ruling several subject cities. Elsewhere, those who profited from it were great despots who, through the military strength they derived from their mercenaries, were not only able to extend their territories but also to establish themselves more firmly in authority.

The s i p o n u , like the rest of Italian society, therefore passed through a transition in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Beginning as a mere family predominance with factional support, it was gradually transformed into an autocratic state ruled by a hereditary dynasty, embracing several previously self-governing cities and their contadi, de- fended by a paid army and administered increasingly by a professional bureaucracy.6 The chronicles of the time reflect not merely the stages of this development but also contemporary responses to each of these, from

' See, for instance, D. Waley The Italian City-Republics (London, 1969). 230-7; L. Martines.

' L. Green Castruccio Castracuni (Oxford, 1986). 129-34. ' See 0. Capirani, R. Manselli. G. Cherubini. A. 1. Pini and C . Chirtolini, Comuni e sipone:

irtifwioni, societa e lotfe pCr l'egemonza (Turin, 1981) (Stona d'ltaliu. ed. G . Galasso, vol. IV),

505-18; L. Simeoni. Le n'porie (Milan. 1950). vol. I .

Power and Imagination: Ctiy-States in Renaissance Italy (New York. 1979). 91-3.

The image of tyranny 337

the point of view both of supporters and opponents of the new regimes. As one might expect, the earliest reactions to them were hostile, coming as they did from men such as the pre-humanist Albertino Mussato who were defenders of communal institutions against the threat of tyranny. However, the success of the early despots soon prompted the adoption of a more critical view of republican government even by those committed to it and a tendency to see in its weakness the cause of the rise of strong, autocratic rulers. Even so, the precariousness of the position of those who had seized power in the city-states of the time led them to be regarded either as heroic figures fighting against overwhelming odds, or as creatures of insatiable ambition whose greed and vanity made them overreach themselves. It was only after the establishment of a temporary diplomatic equilibrium in northern Italy at the end of the 1330s, which brought to an end the political instability of the previous three decades, that the princely characteristics of the new signon' or lords came to be stressed. At the same time, their republican opponents sought to counter the propaganda of what was now presented as a form of enlightened despotism by drawing a clear distinction between, on the one hand, classical and medieval traditions of liberty and, on the other, the tyranny said to be implicit in all forms of arbitrary rule.

Any examination of the views of seigneurial rule expressed in Italian historical writing in the early fourteenth century has first to take account of the position adopted in his works by the Paduan poet, scholar and notary Albertino Mussato (1261-1329).' This writer, who has in recent years acquired the reputation of a precursor of Renaissance humanism but whom I should prefer to regard as an exponent of a late medieval rhetorical literary movement flourishing at his time, was also an active par- ticipant in the political life of his city. He belonged to a group of well-to- do citizens* whose faction opposed both the designs against his commune of the Veronese tyrant Cangrande della Scala and the machinations of the Carrara family, which was then seeking to establish its predominance over Padua. As a distinguished lawyer and man of letters, as well as a pro- minent figure in his community, Mussato frequently acted as an am- bassador for his state' and played a leading role in its defence against Verona" until the rift between the Carrara and his kinsmen and party

' On Mussato, see A. Zardo. Albertino Mtlrrafo (Padua. 1884): M. Minoia. Della vila e delle opere di Albertino Mtlrrafo (Rome, 1884); M. T. Darzi. '11 Mussato storico nel VI centenario della m o m di Albertino Mussato', Arch Veneto. 5th ser., 6 (an 59). 357-404, and I1 Musrafo preumanisfa (1261-1329). L'ambiente e l'opera (Vicenra. 1964); F. Novati, 'Nuovi studi su Albertino Mussato'. Ciornale Sfonco Della Lefferafura Ifaliana, 6 (1885). 177-200, and 7 (1886). 1-47: G. Billanovich. 'I1 preumanesimo padovano', in Sforia della cultura venefa, ed. G. Folena (Vicenza. 1976). 11,

' Guglielmo Cortusi described the party to which he belonged as that of 'quidam populara divites et potcntes': G. CUKUSiO, 'Chronica de novitatibus Padue et Lombardie', ed. B. Pagnin. Rerum ffalicarum Sm$fores (henceforth RfS) (n.ed.) X I I . pt 5. 15. ' A. Simioni, Stona di Padour (Padua. 1968). 334, 348. 491.

lo Ibid. 345-9, 484-90 and J . K. Hyde, Padua in the Age o j D a n f e (Manchester. 1966). 265-72.

41-85.

338 Louis Green

forced him into exile in 1325." His view of politics was as strongly coloured by his own experience as that of his more famous Florentine contemporary Dante, with whom he shared an admiration for the emperor Henry VII, but it was also conditioned by his republican convictions and by his moral interpretation of history. He was, despite his attachment to communal institutions, no enthusiast for popular government, at- tributing at least some of the misfortunes which befell his city to the folly and cupidity of his fellow citizens;" but he remained firm in his opposi- tion to tyranny, in the form both of foreign domination and domestic dictatorship.

His strongest denunciation of the horrors of despotism is contained in his short play, Ecennis, a tragedy in the Senecan mode which deals with the misdeeds and well-merited fall of Ezzelino da Romano. Since Rolan- din0 of Padua's account of this ruler's barbaric atrocities, I' Ezzelino had come to be seen by chroniclers of all political persuasions, as the embodiment of a monstrous iniquity that had attracted due divine retribution in the form of his overthrow, death and the destruction of his family. Mussato cast the story as an illustration of the vindication of justice, using the chorus at the end of the third act to introduce the motif of the ever- moving wheel of fortune to anticipate Ezzelino's downfall and that at the conclusion of the play to emphasize the consistency between its outcome and the moral order of things.I4 What implications he expected his contemporaries to draw from this drama is not clear, but there seems no doubt that he intended i t as both a general condemnation of the evils of tyranny and as a reassertion of his faith that its very excesses would bring upon i t its own destruction. An allusion in his history of his times to Cangrande della Scala as acting 'in the manner of the infamous Ezzelino da Romano''' may, however indicate a more specific connection in his mind between the former overlord of the cities of the Trevisan March and the despot who was seeking once again to unite Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Treviso in a single state.

Mussato's response to tyranny in his own day is more clearly evident from his historical writings. Of these, his Hritonu AugustaI6 which dealt with the Italian expedition of the emperor Henry VII has, by reason of its subject, less to say about the emergence of seigneurial regimes than its continuation, a work On the deeds of the Italians after the death of the

" Simioni, Stona 491-5; Hyde, Podua, 273-5. '' A. Mussato. 'Degestis italicum post Henricum VII Caesarem'. RIS x. cols. 614-19. See also col.

716, discussed below. " Rolandino Patavini. 'Chronica in factis et circa facta Marchie Trivixane'. ed. A. Bonardi, RIS

(n.ed.) V I I I , pt 1 , 41-174. On the treatment of Ezzelino in thirteenth-century chronicles from the region he had dominated. see G. Amaldi. Studisu nonistidella Mazca trm'@ana nell'eta d i k e l i n o do Romano (Rome, 1963), especially pp. 135-204 which deal with Rolandino's work.

" A. Mwato. 'Lcerinis'. RIS X , cols. 796, 800. " 'ad instar infamissimi Eccirini da Romano'. Mussato, 'De gestis'. col. 645. '' A. Mussato. 'Historia Augusta', RIS x. cols. 1-568.


emperor Henry VII (De gestis italicorurn post Henricum VII Caesarern) which is a history of Italy following that ruler's death. The main focus of this latter work is the ultimately unsuccessful struggle of Mussato's native city, Padua, to preserve its independence against the expansionist designs of Cangrande della Scala and its republican institutions against the ambi- tions of the Carrara family. Fifteen books" of detailed historical narrative covering the years 1313-29 deal with this subject. In addition Mussato produced four books in verse that record the capture of Monselice in 1317 and the siege of Padua in 1319 in a style intended to convey the quality of a classical epic (the investment of Padua is, at one stage, compared to the Trojan war!). I '

The last book, the fifteenth of the prose history, is, however, the most coherent, eloquent and interesting. It consists of an invective against Marsiglio da Carrara, who was briefly lord of Padua before its surrender to Verona. In some ways, it resembles Din0 Compagni's chronicle (pro- bably written between 1310 and 1312) in that it records what, from the author's point of view, was the triumph of evil in the form of the victory of an opposing faction that brought about his exile, and then later the discomfiture of the victors as they in turn became victims of the struggle for power they had initiated. Mussato begins by describing the moral degradation of the city which undermined its ability to preserve its freedom and brought on it the disfavour of fortune. l 9 Then he details the violence and illegality of the actions of the Carrara who exploit this situation to establish their authority and expel or eliminate their enemies: his rhetorical skills are put to good use in chronicling the lawlessness of the advent of tyranny with its murders, robberies and violations of virgins, matrons and even nuns.*' This leads on to an account of Marsiglio da Carrara's betrayal of his commune to Cangrande della Scala in 1328, as a means of maintaining his position in it with the support of this more powerful protector. Finally there is an evocative picture of Marsiglio in Verona after Cangrande has taken over control of Padua: the head of the Carrara family asks whether he may return to his native city and to the power he expects to enjoy there, only to have his question parried by an ironic answer: why should he want to go - is not the air as pure in Verona as in Padua, the conditions of life as good, the court as magnificent? Mar- siglio listens and understands - for all that his is a gilded cage, he is still a prisoner.22 With this image of the trickster tricked, Mussato leaves him,

" The first seven of these arc published in RIS x, cols. 573-679. the next seven in 'Sette libri inediti del Degestis italicorurn post Henncum VII di Albertino Mussato', ed. L. Padrin. in Monumenti stosin'publicatidalla R . Deputarione Veneta diStona Patria. 3rd ser. 3 (Venice. 1903), and the last in RIS, cols. 715-68. Scc A. Medin's introduction to 'Sette libri inediti'. pp. iii-vi for a detailed discussion of the composition of this work.

I' Mussato. 'De gestis'. cols. 689-90. " Ibid. col. 716. lo Ibid. cols. 7 4 0 4 . I' Ibid. cols. 746-56. 'I Ibid. cols. 764-5.

340 Louis Green

but not without a concluding thrust, condemning his tyranny and at- tributing his loss of its fruits to a fortune which is an instrument of understood here both as reason and measure, the transgression of the limits of which carried with it an unavoidable penalty.

Mussato’s view of despotism, as the end of his history clearly indicates, derived from his sense of it as a kind of canker which fed upon the vices of free communities but which ultimately suffered itself because of its essen- tial lawlessness and violation of the moral order. Though he lived through a period in which his commune was in crisis, he attributed its problems more to the failings of people than to the military and political difficulties it faced and saw tyranny as the product of a personal ambition which found a ready soil in a corrupted state, but which was itself likely to be short-lived since it too had its roots in human shortcomings. Ferreto dei Ferreti (c. 1297-1337), who died less than a decade after Albertino Mussato, was influenced in his attitude to the events of his time by a different set of preconceptions. He was a citizen of Vicenza which had been under Paduan rule for forty-four years before the emperor Henry VII briefly restored it to a nominal independence under the protection of Cangrande della Scala who was, however, soon able to incorporate i t effectively into his territories. Whereas Mussato had written as a member of a losing faction in a commune which had retained its republican institutions until close to the end of his life and had therefore tended to ascribe their decay to the intrigues of his enemies and the failure of his fellow citizens to heed his advice, Ferreti had lived with foreign domination long enough to have come to terms with it. Although his history ends in 1318, i t was in fact written between 1330 and 1337 and consequently not only reflected its author’s position as a subject of the Scaligeri but was also influenced by the changing climate of Italian politics in the 1330s. At the same time, Ferreti saw himself, in a literary sense, as a disciple of Mussato, to whom he frequently referred24 and whose style he imitated.

He produced a verse history, De Scalzgerorum ongine: p ~ e m a , ~ ’ which is both a piece of outrageous flattery, intended to curry favour with the Della Scala, and one of those late medieval Latin epics which are full of accounts of battles designed to show off the heroism of the founders of the new dynasties of this period. Ferreti’s other main work, his history of

z1 Ibid. col. 768. ” Ferreto de’ Ferreti, Opere, ed. C. Cipolla ( 3 vols. Rome, 1908-20). I , 3 . 6, 272; 1 1 , 169-70. Note

also the dedication to Mussato of the elegy for Benvenuto Campesani ( ibid. 111. 109-11). the author of a poem celebrating the freeing of Vicmza from Paduan rule in 131 1 (C. Cipolla and F. Pellegrini. ‘Pmie minori riguardanti gli Scaligen’. B I Stor I d . 24. 1902, 19-20). Ferreti’s debt to Mussato is emphasized in R. Avaani. ‘I1 prcumanesimo veroneSe’ and G . Arnaldi and L. Capo, ‘ I cronisti di Venezia e della Marca trevigiana’, both in Stona della cultura uenefa. ed. Folena. 11, 144-5 and 283 respcctively . ” Published in ibid. 111. 3-100. On Ferreti’s view of Cangrande. see also A. di Salvo, ‘Limmagine

di Cangrande della Scala nell’opera di Ferreto Ferreti’. B I Stor Ital. 94 (1988), 123-53 and, on Fer- reti’s work in general. G . Zanella, D i F m e t o de’ Ferreti, sforico e @eta ticentino (Vicenze, 1861). and G. Manera Ferreto dei Ferreti, preumanljta vicentino (Vicenza. 1949).

The image of tyranny 34 1

events in Italy from 1250 to 1318 (Hzjtorzu Terum in Itulia gestarum ab anno MCCL ad annum w q u e MCCCXVIZI), is, however, at once more interesting and more objective than the poem which he devoted to exploits of Cangrande della Scala and his forebears. While this prose chronicle does not appear to adopt any particular authorial standpoint, it uses the classical device of speeches to highlight political issues and allow for the expression of the opinions of the actors in his historical drama. Since the episodes which provoke these speeches tend to be rebellions against foreign overlords, as in the case of the revolt of Modena against the Este,26 or debates as to whether foreign powers are to be approached for support and protection, like those in Ferrara in 1308,” the question of liberty does figure quite largely in them, though more in the sense of civic independence than of absence of autocratic rule. Manfredino da Sassuolo, the leader of the Modenese insurgents in 1306, is made to ap- peal, in his address to his fellow citizens, not merely to their hatred of a most ferocious tyrant but also to their desire to restore their pristine freedom.2’ The Ferrarese elder who in 1308 sees the inhabitants of his city as being confronted by the choice between dying in freedom or living as slaves, nevertheless then tries to find a way of preserving a liberty that, as he put i t , ‘is indeed a delightful thing’.29 In his account of the brief recovery of independence by Vicenza in 1310, Ferreti reports the words of one, Jacopo Verlato, which urge risking death in order to regain self- government for the city.” The frequency with which these exhortations to try to return to a lost civic freedom recur in Ferreti’s history make one suspect a nostalgia on his part for the golden age of communal self-rule. However, the context in which these speeches are placed also suggests that there was in fact very little hope, in the prevailing circumstances, of having these aspirations to liberty permanently realized. As his summary of the governments in power in the various north Italian states on the eve of the emperor Henry VII’s arrival in the country makes clear,” the great majority of the Lombard cities were even then subject to overlords and some of the exceptions to this, such as Cremona, about to fall under despotic authority. Wealthy republics, such as Venice and Florence, had preserved their freedom, as had Bologna under papal protection, but elsewhere, as in Pisa and Lucca, where there were popular governments, Ferreti did not approve of them, considering them to be under the tyrannical sway of mob rule. 32 However much he might secretly have yearned for the ideal of a pristine civic liberty, he was for all practical purposes reconciled to what must have seemed to him an irresistible trend towards

l6 Ferreti. Opere. 111, 214-19. I’ Ibid. 249-50. I’ Ibid. I , 216. ” ‘libenas quidem iocunda rcs est’. ibid. I , 249.

Ibid. I . 515. ’I Ibid. I , 276-7.

Ibid. I . 277.

342 Louis Green

despotism and subjugation of smaller cities such as his own. He was essentially a provincial intellectual who recognized his need to seek patronage from the rulers of what had become his metropolitan power, and this clearly influenced his judgement of the tyrants with whom he dealt in his history. Cangrande, for instance, he compared on one occasion with Judas Maccabeus, Hannibal and Caesar,33 while in speaking of Jacopo, the father of Mussato’s enemy, Marsiglio da Carrara, he described him not only as the first Paduan autocrat since Ezzelino da Romano, but also as prudent, fair, of inflexible integrity, distinguished for his honesty, generous in giving of himself, agreeable to the people, and endowed with many other fine q~alities.~‘

The tendency to accept despotism as a normal condition in Italian politics which Ferreti’s work exemplifies is also evident in the Chronicle of events in Padua and Lombardy (Chronica de novitatibus Padue et Lom- bardie) composed by Guglielmo Cortusi (or degli Cortusi) (c. 1285-1361). Cortusi was, like Mussato, a lawyer from Paduaj5 but one who, being a generation younger than his illustrious precursor as jurist and historian, had been much more affected by the changes in his city’s situation since the 1320s. As a young man, he had been a citizen of a free commune; by middle age, he would have witnessed the seizure of power by the Carrara, the surrender of his state to Cangrande della Scala and the ensuing period of Veronese domination; in the last years of his life, he would have seen the recovery of the independence of Padua and the restoration of the Car- rara’s lordship over it. His political experience thus encompassed a series of phases in the unstable history of his times and he was therefore aware of the transience of both republican and seigneurial regimes. At the same time, like Ferreti but unlike Mussato, he was ready to praise despots whose character, in his opinion, warranted a favourable judgement. For instance, he said of Cangrande that he was an upright and prudent man who, although he was very determined to dominate and harsh in his punishment of those who conspired against him, was faithful to his friends and, even though he had been a very harsh enemy to the Paduans, became a father to them once they came under his rule, being a man of many virtues who valued jus t i~e . ’~ Such an estimate on Cortusi’s part did not, however, necessarily imply, as Ferreti’s more adulatory comments might have done, an endorsement of tyranny as such. It rather reflected a tendency to view politics neutrally, giving credit, on the one hand, to a great despot, but, on the other, also writing with enthusiasm of the

I f Ibid. 11, 172. ” Ibid. 1 1 . 256. ” He is recorded as a member of the Paduan college of judges between 1315 and 1361, in other

words up to a date more than three decades after Mussato’s death: G. degli Cortusi. ‘Chronica de novitatibus Padue et Lombardie. ed. B. Pagnin. RIS ( n . e d . ) x ~ ~ , pt 5, p. iv. On Cortusi, set also the entry on him by J. K. Hyde in Dirionurio biograjico degli Italiani, vol. 29, 806-7 and G. Arnaldi and L. Capo, ‘1 cronisti’. pp. 313-19. ” Ibid. 58.

T h e image of tyranny 343

peaceful and magnificent state of the republic of Padua in 1310” and of the rejoicing of its citizens at their liberation from the oppression of Ezzelino da Romano in 1259.’8 Cortusi’s sense of the complexity of politics, indicated by his willingness to give both autocratic and communal governments their due, is also reflected in his treatment of Mar- siglio da Carrara’s surrender of Padua to Cangrande della Scala. To convey dramatically the dilemma in which this ruler found himself at this juncture, Cortusi goes one better than those historians who had invented imaginary speeches to disclose the motives for historical decisions by at - tributing a soliloquy to him. Thus, he has Marsiglio, who has seen things go from bad to worse, musing that the exiled traitors are at the gates of the city, while within it he hears lamentations, sees the weeping beg, citizens killed not only in the prisons but in their private homes, infinite crimes committed by those proclaiming justice, without himself daring to resist for fear of his own death because of the power of the perpetrators of these acts; appeals to the dukes of Carinthia and Austria to relieve Padua have failed as have requests for help to Florence, the papal legate in Bologna, to Mantua and Ferrara; the captain of the mercenaries refuses to fight without a commitment of more money and the Venetians are prepared to intervene only on their own terms. Hence, Marsiglio concludes, there remains no alternative to reaching an accommodation with Cangrande. ’’

The ascription of these sentiments to Marsiglio da Carrara clearly places him in a light different from that in which Mussato had seen him. He is presented not as a villain but as a victim of circumstances, the loss of the independence of Padua being attributed not to his greed and ambition but to the impossibility of the position in which he finds himself. The awareness of the limitation to which human actions are liable which this episode in Cortusi’s chronicle reveals is also evident in a more general sense in its treatment of the prosperity and decline of states or regimes. A kind of pattern can be distinguished in his history in which the description of a high-point of success or magnificence is followed by an account of the misfortunes that are seen to issue from it. For instance, the celebra- tion of the peace and greatness of Padua in 1310 which has already been mentioned acts as a prelude to the story of its subsequent reverses. An even clearer example is the account given by Cortusi of the power and grandeur of Mastino and Albert0 della Scala in February 1336 when their state had reached its zenith, which concludes with the telling sentence, ’But because fortune does not cease in changing the highest to the lowest and the lowest to the highest, straightaway in the month of April their ventures began to some extent to decline.”’ There follows on this a

I’ Ibtd. 12. ” Ib id . 9. I’ Ibid. 53. ‘’ Ibtd. 74. ’Sed quia fortuna non cesat mutare summa infimis et infima summis. statim mense

Aprilis ceperunt eorum facta in aliquo declinare.’

344 Louis Green

description of the disintegration of the Scaligeri empire as a result of the war with Venice and Florence, the rapidity of its collapse providing, as it were by implication, a commentary upon the pride which the vanity and display of the Veronese court had expressed.

For Cortusi, tyranny formed part of the wider landscape of the Italian politics of his time. It shared with other forms of government the instability inherent in human institutions. Despotic states, like republican ones, were caught up in the play of forces ultimately too powerful for them to control but, while they endured, they could be judged by the same kinds of standards of probity, integrity, justice and virtue which applied to other regimes. The way he saw the signon'e of his age was conditioned to a large degree by his living during a phase in their development in which they had succeeded in undermining the political viability of the smaller communes but had not as yet become secure in themselves. The metaphor which naturally suggested itself to him and his contemporaries to evoke and explain their life cycles was that of fortune. This concept had, of course, already figured in Mussato's interpretation of tyranny, though with overtones which implied far more strongly its role as a means of restoring the balance of the moral order. Ferreti had also employed i t , anticipating Cortusi's use of it to convey the sense of a sudden transforma- tion of prosperity into disaster in his comments on the overthrow of Uguc- cione della Faggiuola, lord of Pisa and Lucca between 1314 and 1316. These emphasize its role in overawing the proud, changing the outcome of events4' and acting as a corrective to any inclination to trust in the fallacious powers of this world.

In the Tuscan chronicles of the period, which shared with their Lombard counterparts the notion that tyrants tended to overreach and so destroy themselves, less stress was placed on fortune as such and more on the effects of ambition. However, in one Pisan history, namely Raniero Gran- chi's poem De poeliis Turciae4' (Of the battles of Tuscany), this fatal force was explicitly linked with the career of Uguccione della Faggiuola's successor as ruler of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani. But in this work, as in Giovanni Villani's Chronicle, the theme of the despot who ultimately fell victim to his own lust for power was combined with another, that of the weakness and indecisiveness of republican government, against which the wrt& of the heroic, if doomed despot could be contrasted. Curiously, this feature of the Tuscan historiography of the time stemmed not from a crisis in communal institutions which in this part of Italy still functioned relatively well, but because of what appeared to be the extraordinary success, in war and in the conquest of new territories, of the few tyrants who emerged to challenge the free cities of the region. The preservation of the

" 'sic superbos conterit. sic rerum exitus mutat et corrigit', Ferreti, Opere. 1 1 . 215. R. Granchi ( R . dc Grancis). 'De proeliis Tusciae'. ed. C. Meliconi), in RIS(n.ed.) X I , pt 2, and

Set particularly Book 111 of Granchi's poem (RIS (n.ed.) X I , pt 2 . 68-106). RIS X I , C O ~ S . 291-356.

4 1


independence of Florence and Pisa in the aftermath of the victories of Uguccione and Castruccio endorsed confidence in the underlying strength of these states, while the reverses they had suffered also exposed inadequacies in their policies and leadership. In the light of this, it is not as surprising as it might at first seem that Castruccio Castracani, who had been regarded with such hostility by their fellow citizens, should nevertheless have been presented as.in many respects an admirable figure by both Granchi and Villani. The former's favourable portrait of him is the more understandable in that his work was yet another of those chivalric epics in late Gothic Latin that concentrated on battle scenes, for which the military exploits of Uguccione and Castruccio provided excellent material. But the representation of these despots as resolute and master- ful men also clearly served another purpose in his poem: that of showing up the failures and factional conflicts which had marred the history of his commune in the 1320s. It is significant that the last book of De proeliis Twciae, which records the Pisan capture of Lucca in 1342,44 shows his city as emerging from its previous decline and that, for all his praise of the prowess as soldiers of the two tyrants he deals with, he sees the power of each as destined by fortune to be no more than short-lived. There is no suggestion of the inherent superiority of despotism over republican government; the lessons of the poem derive rather from a sequence of events by which high points of success led on to failure. Thus, the battle of Montecatini which was a triumph for both Uguccione della Faggiuola and Pisa was followed by the sudden downfall of the one and the entry of the other into a period of weakness and civic dissension. Similarly, Castruccio Castracani's victory at Altopascio and his recovery of Pistoia preceded his unexpected death. Fortune, i t would seem, allowed no earthly prosperity to endure and, in Castruccio's case, there was the fur- ther suggestion of supernatural intervention in the thwarting of his political designs in that his demise was linked to his having plundered the shrine of the Virgin Mary in the cathedral of Pisa to pay his troops im- mediately before he contracted his fatal illness. 4 J

For Granchi, therefore, a tyrant could be a heroic figure, conceded by fortune the mastery of his fate for his destined but nevertheless subject also to both the divinely ordained and fatal limits of his authority. As a Dominican friar, he took what was ultimately a religious view of the nature of political power. For Giovanni Villani who was a Florentine mer- chant chronicler writing in the vernacular, the motives for representing a despot such as Castruccio Castracani on the whole favourably but not completely uncritically were more complex. For Villani , Castruccio was the archetypal tyrant, driven to war by his desire to enhance his ~ t a t e , ~ '

" Book VIII (RIS XI, C O ~ S . 349-56). '' Ibid. col. 345. '' See especially cols. 297-8. 301-3. 327. " G. Villani, Ctonica. ed. F. G. Dragomanni (Florence. 1844-5). IX. 78, 106.

346 Louis Green

but also a vigorous, brave, skilful military commander who brought honour on himself and shame on his Florentine enemies whose in- competence he often showed up in his many campaigns against them.48 At the same time, he was a cruel and arrogant man whose pride grew with his power, thereby helping to bring on his divinely ordained end.'g When Villani was concerned to castigate his fellow citizens for their tendency to disagree amongst themselves, to be dilatory in making decisions and for their political and military mistakes, he tended to build up Castruccio as the embodiment of all that the Florentines should have been, but could not make themselves become. On the other hand, like Granchi, Villani also believed that divine and moral justice ultimately triumphed in history and therefore also saw the Lucchese ruler as an example of a man ultimately punished by God for the ruthlessness with which he sought to extend his power. The ambivalence of his attitude reflects his response to the particular situation of his time in which despots were still very in- secure in their hold on their authority but had nevertheless demonstrated their ability to win victories over communes, the governments of which had not as yet adapted very effectively to new methods of warfare. His way of reconciling both the short-term success and long-term failure of such Tuscan would-be founders of regional states as Uguccione and Castruccio with his basic preconceptions as to the nature of things was to attribute the former to the vices of his fellow citizens and the latter to those of these tyrants.

By the end of the 1330s, however, both north Italian politics generally and the surviving major Stgnone in particular were beginning to stabilize. with the result that the kinds of conditions about which Cortusi, Granchi and Villani had written up to that time no longer held. In Milan especially, around which the Visconti were creating what was to become a durable principality, a different perception of despotic authority was emerging. This was expressed by the city's leading chronicler of the period, Galvano Fiamma, who, like Raniero Granchi, was a Dominican. As a historian, Fiamma was almost certainly inspired by the example of another friar from his convent of Sant'Eustorgio, Stefanardo di Vicomer- cato, who, late in the previous century, had written a historical poem, en- titled Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani, to celebrate the exploits of Ottone Visconti" who had laid the foundations of his family's later power. Like Stefanardo, Fiamma was a staunch Visconti partisan. In his historical writings, and particularly in his Manipulus Jorum and the Oplsculum de rebus gestrj ab Acxone, Luchino et Johanne Vicecomitibus (The bunch offowers and The little work on the deeds of A u o , Luchino and Giovanni Viscontg, he sought to present the rulers of Milan as

" Ibid. IX. 115, 127, 193, 209, 214. '* Ibid. IX. 323: X . 59, 86. '' Fra Stefanardo da Vicomercato. 'Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani'. ed. G. Galligaris. RIS

(n.ed.) IX. pt 1 .


benevolent despots, explicitly dissociating them from the term ‘tyrant’s’ which earlier writers had customarily applied to the new lords who had seized power in Italian communes. In his portraits of Matteo,” AZZO” and Luchino Visconti, ” Fiamma stressed their virtue, chastity, honesty, piety, accessibility to their subjects, generosity to the poor and concern for the administration of justice. To Azzo and Luchino, he also attributed a magnificence of life-style, building programmes, patronage of works of art and of festivals, appropriate to princes. In his general summary of the qualities of the Visconti family,” he described them as merciful but always victorious, gentle rather than cruel, lavish in living and building, well formed and strong in body but moderate in eating and drinking and pious and respectful to religious and virtuous men. Elsewhere in his account of Azzo’s period in power, Fiamma made much of that ruler’s concern for the welfare of his people, evidenced both in the construction of various public worksJ6 and their love for him.” Although, like earlier panegyrists of great despots, Fiamma devoted considerable space to military victories and conquests, what is remarkable about his record of the achievements of the Visconti is that his main emphasis was upon their success in establishing an effective, benign and well-administered state. This undoubtedly reflected the changing situation of a s i p o n a such as that of the Visconti at this time. Because of the emergence of a balance of power in Lombardy, the age of the rapid expansion of territorial principalities had been followed by that of their consolidation. The struggle for dominance had been replaced by the demarcation of zones of influence of the various main states. Within these, governments sought to acquire an air of legitimacy and attempted to gain the allegiance of their subjects. The stabilization of frontiers at once permitted more resources to be devoted to display and munificence for the glorification of the regime and gave a greater degree of security to what in effect now became ruling dynasties.

The normalization of tyrannical rule and its conversion into ostensible princely authority also had important implications for the attitudes which republics took to such autocratic regimes. Earlier in the fourteenth century, despotic power in Italy had been extremely precarious: of the lord- ships over cities which Ferreti had listed on the eve of the emperor Henry VII’s entry into Italy, only one, that of the Scaligeri, had lasted more than two decades.’’ However, the families in power by about 1340, with the

” See particularly G . Flamma (Fiamma), ‘Opusculum de rebus gestis ab Aczone. Luchino ac

” G. Flamma (Fiamma). ‘Chronica Mediolani seu Manipulus Florum’. RIS X I , cols. 710-11. 11 Flamma. ‘Opusculum . . .’, RIS X I I , 1029, RIS (n.ed.) X I I , pt 4 , 33. ” Ibid. cols. 1030-1 (pp. 34-5). ” Ibid. col. 1031 (pp. 55-6). ’‘ Ibid. col. 1020 (p. 24). ” Ibid. col. 1023 (p. 27). ” Ferrcti. Opere, I . 275-7. Some of the lords he lists, such as the Della Torre of Milan, were

deposed as a result of the coming of Henry VII to Italy. Others, such as the Correggio of Parma and

Johanne Vicecomitibus’. RIS X I I . col. 1031, and RIS (n.ed.) X I I , pt 4 , (ed. C. Castiglioni), 36.

348 Louis Green

exception of the Carrara and Della Scala which were deposed by Gian- Galeazzo Visconti at the end of the Trecento, generally continued to govern their states into the fifteenth century. Communes such as Florence, therefore, found themselves confronted from the 1340s on- wards by despotisms such as that of Milan which were both more durable and more formidable than those which had been in existence thirty years before. The greater stability and strength of the great szgnone therefore made it necessary to find grounds for the justification of traditional liberties in terms other than the superiority of the institutions they guaranteeed to short-lived dictatorships based on mere force. In these circumstances, Florentine chroniclers such as Matteo Villani (who continued his brother Giovanni's work after the latter's death in the Black Death of 1348) adopted a more ideological attitude to tyranny, influenced perhaps by the incursion into Tuscany of Archbishop Giovanni Visconti after Bologna had been surrendered in 1350 to this ruler of Milan by its lords, the Pep01i.~~ Matteo displayed a marked hostility to the very idea of despotism, one suspects not because he feared its emergence in his city but because he saw it as an external threat. The image which he presented of the tyrant was a conventional one, that of a violent and treacherous upstart driven by an insatiable appetite for power which ultimately destroyed him.60 At the same time, however, he stressed, more than the previous generation of historians had done, the violation by these despots of all the rules of normal political practice for the realiza- tion of their ends, which were seen as less concerned with gaining power over their own states than with extending i t , by cruelty and deception, over those of others.6' The impression left by his references to tyranny is that of a general and almost abstract tendency: tyrants as a group are castigated for an inhumanity that is seen as inseparable from their essen- tial nature. Matteo Villani's denigration of despotism was also closely linked with his idealisation of civic liberty. In an interesting passage which I discussed in my Chronicle k t o History,62 he identified the preservation of free institutions with the Guelph cause and tyranny with the Ghibelline one, implying by this a qualitative and ideological distinction between what up to that time had been merely opposing factions in Italian politics. Elsewhere, he went on to elaborate this point , 6 3 claiming that the freedom of the Italian communes derived from that of the ancient Romans who had originally granted the emperors their power. Therefore the citizens of the Tuscan cities owed no allegiance to their

Bonacolsi of Mantua, lost out in struggles for power towards the end of the 1920s. The Este of Fer- rara. whose regime was to survive into the fifteenth century, were temporarily in exile (when Ferreti recorded these rulers) because of their defeat in the recent war against the Church. " M. Villani, C r a i c a , cd. F. G . Dragomanni (Florence. 1846), 11, 3. 4 .

* I

' I Ibid. VIII, 24, and L. Green. Chronicle into History (Cambridge. 1972). 81. " M. Villani, Cronica, IV, 77.

Ibid. VI. 1: IX. 56. Ibid. 111, 99: VIII. 109: IX , 71.


supposed imperial overlords since sovereignty resided in them rather than in those who had usurped the authority that was properly theirs. He went on to assert that those who were Ghibelline and became the emperor's supporters by that very act paved the way for tyranny.6J

Drawing on a tradition established by the earliest responses to the rise of despotism, that of identifying it with immorality and violence, Matteo Villani extended it into a defence of republican institutions as the only proper and legitimate government of the Italian communes. Tyranny derived from the mistaken renunciation of an ancient birthright and it was therefore to be expected that it should in practice be perverse and un- natural. Paradoxically, this judgement upon autocratic rule coincided with a phase in the development of the slgnone when they were, in fact, becoming an established feature of Italian politics. The clue to this seem- ing anomaly lies, however, in the fact that it was the very consolidation of what had been transient usurpations of power into enduring regimes that made it necessary for a republican such as Matteo Villani to find grounds to reject them in principle. Building upon the traditional view that tyranny owed its origins to the vices of men, he came to distinguish between what he saw as the proper state of Italian society which could be traced back to that prevailing in the self-governing city of classical times and the degradation not merely of the institutions but also of the values and virtues associated with these free communities as a result of the ces- sion of authority to emperors and the rise of despotism in communes in which those who represented imperial power established dictatorships. It is interesting that, at the very period when the apologists for what were in effect becoming princely regimes were justifying them in terms of their beneficial effects, those who feared the growing strength of the greater signon'e should have come to defend constitutional rule as the one legitimate political tradition in Italy, the claims of which could be endorsed by invoking its continuous history since the Roman republic.

The emergence of two clearly articulated, ideologically opposed responses to tyranny in the middle decades of the fourteenth century pro- vides the background to Bartolus of Sassoferrato's treatise on the subject. While this work may have been intended, as Emerton has argued,6' to help to endorse the policies of Cardinal Egidio Albornoz, the legate who in the 1350s sought to reimpose the Church's authority over the papal state in which pe t ty despotisms had mushroomed since the popes had transferred their residence from Rome to Avignon, it also took cognizance in a more general sense of the relatively new phenomenon of

'' Ibid. IV. 7 8 . " E. Emerton. Humanism and Tyranny: Studies m the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, Mass.,

1925), 124. This view has been questioned in D. Quaglione, Politzcu e dinito nel Trecento: il 'De tyranno' di Bartolo di Sarsoferrato (1314-1357) (Florence, 1983). 63-7 . Quaglione claims Bartolus was more an advocate of the independence of Perugia than a supporter of Albomoz's attempts to reassert papal authority. He considers De tyranno to have been prompted more by the general pro- blem of tyranny in the late 1350s.

350 Louis Green

the si&zon'e. Bartolus' main preoccupation, as a jurist, was with the question of the legitimacy of tyrannical regimes and their actions. His over- riding conclusion was that, since tyranny was unjust, the acts of those who practised it could have no true legal force.66 At the same time, however, he conceded that emperors and popes might, for reasons of expediency or to avoid a greater evil, make despots their vicars. In this eventuality, such rulers were still to be condemned if they acted tyrannically, but otherwise they could be tolerated (given that their title to their power was valid) until such time as they were deposed 'in accordance with justice and without injury to the pe~ple ' .~ ' Since, by the mid-fourteenth century, virtually all Italian seigneurial regimes nominally derived their authority from either imperial or papal vicariates, this implied what was in effect a qualitative judgement on tyranny. Rulers with no legitimate title or those with such a title who governed tyrannically could not rightfully exercise power, but those whose position was endorsed by a just prince could be accepted unless they oppressed their subjects or until they were deposed. While on the face of it, Bartolus' view of tyranny closely resembled that of Matteo Villani in associating it implicitly with misrule and illegality, it also left open the possibility of provisional recognition of the authority of despotic regimes such as Galvano Fiamma had claimed Azzo Visconti had established in Milan.

One of the paradoxes of both of Bartolus' response and that of the chroniclers to the rise of the sz&zonk was that, at a time when these were becoming ever more common and more firmly established, they were seen by all but the committed defenders of autocratic rule as essentially abnor- mal. Regarded first as expressions of vice, then as illustrations of the instability of politics, they eventually came either to be condemned or justified on the basis of two alternative myths. The first of these, republican in inspiration, assumed a fundamental incompatibility between the natural inclinations of a people uncorrupted by servitude (or subjection to an absolute authority) and any kind of arbitrary rule which was represented as a perversion of the original and proper condition of the civil community.68 The second, promoted by the publicists of despots, was that what had initially been created as a tyranny was no longer a tyrannical but a just state. Both of these myths evaded the realities of the prevailing realpolitik and moral compromises of Italian politics by idealizing one or other of the two main institutional forms that had sur-

'* Banolw of Swoferrato, De tyrunno. chs. 7 and 8, published in Quaglione, Politica e dintto. 188. 196. " Ibid. ch. 10 in Quaglione. Politica e dintto, 204-5. Op this, see also A. T. Sheedy. Bartolw on

Social Conddzas in the Fourteenth Century (New York. 1967). 79. 'Bartolus attempted to har- monize the defacto existence of tyrants with the de iure denial of their authority.' " This is illustrated in the frescos by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. depic-

ting tyranny and its effects. These. of course, have bem widely discussed. especially in N . Rubins- tein. 'Political ideas in Sicnese. art', J Wurburg C. 21 (1958), 188-9. and Q. Skinner. 'Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the artist as political philosopher', P Er Acad. 72 (1986). 3 3 4 .

The image of tyranny 35 1

vived the changes and dislocations of the early Trecento - the greater republics and the new regional signorie. Thereby, a double standard was created to preserve, in an age of political pragmatism and shifting alliances, something of the moral certitude which has been inspired by the ideological loyalties of the previous century and the sharp distinctions then prevailing between two opposed political positions, the differences between which had been seen by the partisans of each in terms of right and wrong or good and bad.

The causes of the Church and of the Empire which had been the pretext for the factionalism out of which tyranny had grown, were - now that it was established - transformed into those of the defence of republican liberty or the creation of a paternalistic order. In the process, however, a wider divergence had opened out between the actuality of conditions and the ideas which expressed them. Many successive attempts had been made to place the inconvenient phenomenon of despotism in a series of moral frames, each suited to the particular phase of development it was then passing through, but these had caught merely its transient qualities and, in the end, it became possible to make its image conform to current expectations only by identifying it with an abstract stereotype. As a consequence, the way it came to be perceived lost the connections that even earlier representations of it had maintained between the concept i t embodied and the historical forces which had brought it into being. The need to legitimize regimes founded upon the logic of power rather than adherence to some cause sanctioned by tradition led to the kind of institu- tionalized duplicity Machiavelli was later to expose. But, before this point had been reached, the chroniclers who had recorded the rise of the signon’e had nevertheless made a contribution to the political culture of future generations in creating what became almost archetypal characterizations of tyrants as men animated by a single-minded and amoral passion for power that ultimately destroyed them. Their capacity to dramatize history was to ensure that, even when the circumstances they described had changed, this figure should survive and take its place in the gallery of stock political types.

Monash University

the image of tyranny in early fourteenth-century italian historical writing

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