Competing visions of the state and social welfare: The Medici Dukes, the Bigallo magistrates, and local hospitals in sixteenth-century Tuscany.

In 1542, Florence's Duke Cosimo I established a magistracy to supervise territorial hospitals and consolidate poor relief. Tense relations between the magistracy and these hospitals demonstrate the barriers to bureaucratic centralization in the sixteenth-century state, and underscore the fact that the shift from traditional charity to 'new philanthropy' was as much geographical and cultural as temporal Tensions between the magistracy and successive Medici Dukes also demonstrate how in negotiations between bureaucrats and local communities territorial rulers could play both sides to advance their personal authority, and could learn from the difficulties of one magistracy how better to design another.

On an August day in 1557, the people of the small town of Buggiano, 40 km. northwest of Florence, crowd into the Palazzo del Podesta to elect a Rector for the hostel that runs in the Virgin's name and under the community's oversight. The Ospedale di S. Maria di Buggiano is, like most rural ospedali, extremely small: two beds providing rest for pilgrims, and eight fields generating the food and resources which feed both them and the local poor. The previous rector had died and it was time to elect a successor. A member of the local council, the Dodici Consiglieri, proposes a priest, Don Lorenzo di Lucantonio di Marcho di Francesco Ricordati da Buggiano, to serve a life term with the obligation to offer good hospitality ("sia obligato di tener buona spidalita".) Armed with their black and white beans, the locals offer a resounding endorsement: only two black 'nay' votes against 48 white. The results are sent off to the Abbot of the Badia in Florence, the ospedale's superiore who duly confirms the election. Don Lorenzo immediately sets about getting sheets made for the beds, a lock fitted in the door, and the roof repaired. The Ospedale di S. Maria di Buggiano is back in business. (1).

A few months later in Florence, the eleven Captains of the Company of S. Maria del Bigallo are also meeting to select a replacement for a deceased colleague. Each proposes an individual and, after discussion, the group prepares a slate of three nominees from which Duke Cosimo I de' Medici selects a new Captain, Carlo di Bernardo de Medici, to serve a life term. Once selected, this nominee will join his colleagues under the chairmanship of Bishop Lodovico Serristori of Bitetto, in supervising the work of people like Don Lorenzo Ricordati of Buggiano. (2) Fifteen years before, Cosimo had put all charitable hostels (or ospedali) in the dominion under the supervision of a new magistracy known as the Provveditori sopra Ii derelitti e poveri mendicanti (Proveditors over the abandoned and begging poor). In November of that same year (1542), he had worked through the Senate to suppress the Company of S. Maria del Bigallo and transfer its considerable assets (including at least twelve ospedali in city and contado) to these Provveditori. From that time they were most often known simply as the Capitani del Bigallo. (3) The Captains were to supervise the activities of the hundreds of local ospedali found in the cities, towns, and villages of the Florentine dominion, ensuring that true hospitality was offered, that administrators were honest, and that funds left over after local needs had been met were passed on to Florence where they would underwrite a central ospedale for the poor managed by the Captains of the Bigallo.

Don Lorenzo Ricordati and the Bigallo Captains were both charged with helping the poor, but their different contexts made them competitors, if not necessarily opponents. Throughout sixteenth-century Europe, civic, ducal, and national governments were struggling to consolidate their networks of small local charitable institutions into a system of poor relief with the resources and discipline to address a mounting subsistence crisis marked by rising population, static food supply, and more frequent outbreaks of famine and plague. Most tried to tap into local charitable resources which were commonly thought to be siphoned off by fraudulent administrators, yet locals needed these same resources to feed and house their own poor. On one level, relations between local ospedali and central administrators offer test cases for the study of (often partial) bureaucratic centralization. Yet on another, these relations illustrate diverging notions of charity, and underscore the fact that the shift from traditional charity to what Brian Pullan described as "the new philanthropy" was as much geographical as temporal. (4) The case of the Bigallo demonstrates how in negotiations between center and periphery, territorial rulers could play both sides to advance their personal authority, and could learn from the difficulties of one bureaucratic magistracy how better to design another. (5)

Current studies of early modern absolutism emphasize continual negotiations between ruler and ruled. The rulers who watch serenely from oversized portraits, who gaze with gravitas from equestrian statutes, and whose grand palaces were the stage for a ritualized theatre of control, spent much of their time cutting deals, saving appearances, and forestalling opposition -- in short, negotiating constantly with nobles, communities, and groups for acceptance of their rule. The effective ruler was not the one who brusquely subdued opponents, but the one who avoided aggravating those opponents who couldn't be easily subdued, and who gradually lured most others into his court with patronage plums and sometimes empty honors. Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Tuscany from 1537 is often taken as the exemplar of this dual strategy. Dealt a very weak hand when he came to the ducal throne, Cosimo played his cards so successfully that he became the prototypical absolutist ruler, outmanoevering those patricians who had seen him a s their puppet, blunting the religio-political opposition posed by the remaining disciples of Savonarola, recasting governing bodies, and securing the obedience of governed localities sufficiently that Medici rule could survive his son Francesco's less active style (from 1574). By the time second son Ferdinando mounted the throne in 1587, many Florentine patricians had accepted the court as the door to personal advancement, and at least some Tuscan localities had accepted the dominion and the dukes as guarantors of local survival. (6)

The Captains of the Bigallo from 1542 through 1609 very much represented the center. Most came from established families; the majority were members of the Council of 200, and of the honorific Order of S. Stefano, and a good number were also members of the Senate. They were Medici loyalists whose ambitious efforts to audit and supervise the local ospedali under their care were driven by belief in the political and social benefits of a government that was strong, centralizing, and secular. Their failure to realize this vision had two related causes. One was the political expediency with which the Medici dukes negotiated absolutism. The dukes followed a dual strategy with the Bigallo, on one hand using it to reward supporters with magisterial office, but on the other hand preventing these same magistrates from fulfilling their mandate to supervise and centralize local ospedali when it seemed that this might aggravate and alienate local communities. The other reason for the Bigallo's failure was a culture clash; its advocacy of rational and centralized 'new philanthropy' ran counter to a tradition in which charity defined, reinforced, and protected local rural community. This article will assess the Captains and their activities under the first three Medici Dukes, and then consider how six small ospedali -- one in Florence and the others in different parts of the Florentine distretto -- related to their own communities, to the Bigallo magistracy and, in one direct instance, to Duke Francesco I. Some comparisons will be made to another of Cosimo I's new magistracies, the Nove Conservatori della giurisdizione e del dominio fiorentino, to see whether its mandate and operation were shaped in part by the Bigallo's troubled relations with ospedali in the duchy. Center and periphery may have understood charity differently, but the Medici Dukes understood enough of each to fashion an effective political strategy playing one against the other as a means of preserving and expanding their personal power.

The first three dukes appointed 71 Captains of the Bigallo over the almost seven-decades under consideration here: Cosimo I appointed 31, Francesco I, 14, and Ferdinando I, 26. These appointments were an early example of the Dukes' gradual departure from the Florentine tradition of filling key judicial and administrative magistracies with men serving short and rotating terms by a process of extraction overseen by the office of the Tratte. While the Tratte processed Bigallo appointments, there was no scrutiny or extraction. (7) The Captains were a self-perpetuating group who normally served life terms, though the fact that both Francesco and Ferdinando made a rash of appointments upon coming to office suggests that vacancies were determined by more than Captains' mortality alone. Upon the death of a captain, existing members each nominated a replacement; from these names they together prepared a slate of three nominees from which the Duke made his choice. The President was always a bishop drawn from a diocese in the Florentine dominion (from 1565 this was consistently the Bishop of Fiesole), nominated by the Archbishop and appointed by the Duke in a procedure intended to mitigate the problem of a lay magistracy exercising control over those ospedali which might be ecclesiastical. (8) Table 1 compares in years the actual length of the life terms served by the Captains appointed by the three dukes. These ranged in practice from one year to 33; the mean among Cosimo and Ferdinando's captains was twelve years, while that for Francesco's was eight. Cosimo's 1542 decree created a magistracy of five; within months he expanded it to twelve members. This could be interpreted as recognizing the scale of its work, but it looks equally like a dilution of its authority, since most administrative, financial and judicial magistracies in ducal Tuscany numbered only five to nine members, with some as small as three. In most cases these magistrates also served strictly limited terms ranging from six months to three years. (9) Large boards with life-term members were more characteristic of contemporary hospitals or confraternities like the Buonomini di San Martino, the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, or the Company of the Misericordia. Hence, in size, appointment process, and terms of office, the Bigallo did not follow the local models for administrative, financial, or judicial magistracies, but those for local charities. Contemporaries familiar with Florentine bureaucracy might have joked that what was presented to the Senate in November 1542 as a magistracy swallowing a confraternity was in fact the reverse. And indeed, to the end of our period, the Bigallo Captains frequently protested that they were not a confraternity, but a magistracy, and asked to have the attendant powers and recognition. (10)

Who were these Captains? As Table Two shows, the majority were members of the active and established political class of Florence. (11) A steadily rising percentage came from families that had held priorships four times or more through the fifteenth century. Beyond lineage, the prerequisite for political participation in Ducal Tuscany was personal membership in the Council of 200, the assembly drawn from those who had passed scrutiny for magistracies. Most Captains were members of the 200 before joining the Bigallo. A somewhat smaller but steadily rising percentage of Captains were also members of the 48member executive Senate. (12) Finally, moving from the organs of power to the organs of ritual and prestige, most Bigallo Captains were also knights of Santo Stefano, the chivalric-crusading order created by Cosimo I in 1562 to capitalize on the booming market for marks of honor, and possibly to sweep the Mediterranean of Corsair pirates in the process. (13)

Some Bigallo Captains had done exceedingly well by ducal patronage. Among the longest-serving of Cosimo I's appointments was Giulio di Alessandro del Caccia (served 1559-1590), a doctor of laws, frequent ambassador (to Ferrara, Milan, Parma, Savoy, the Holy Roman Emperor, Philip II of Spain), and Governor of Siena. (14) Among Francesco I's appointments, Benedetto di Buonaccorto Ugaccioni (served 1582-1590), was a favorite who supervised numerous public works projects in the dominion (Livorno, Pratolino, Lampeggio), and in the city (working on the Palazzo Pitti, S. Maria del Fiore, and Ponte S. Trinita); he was also the first of his family appointed to the Senate. (15) Finally, among Ferdinando I's Captains we find Giovanni di Domenici Bonsi (served 1590-1601), a cleric and doctor of laws who negotiated the marriage of Marie de Medici to France's Henri IV, accompanied her to France as her almoner, and became Bishop of Biziers and subsequently Cardinal of S. Clemento. (16)

Admittedly, some Bigallo Captains had skeletons in the closet, such as association with the piagnoni, those followers of Savonarola who had long sought to implement his vision of a holy city with a strong republican government and a reformed and rationalized system of poor relief. A piagnone underground had survived the first Medici restoration in various confraternities and charities, and was ready to spring into active service when the Republic revived in May 1527. The Republic's collapse three years later made some disillusioned piagnoni more ready to co-operate with the Medici in realizing their vision for charitable reform. Only one of the first set of Captains, Orlandino Orlandini, had been personally identified with the Savonarolan piagnoni, though a few others like Francesco Inghirami had piagnone branches in the family tree. Some of Cosimo I's later appointments had more immediate associations: Giovanni di Banco degli Albizzi (1559-61) had been a member of the confraternity of S. Michele Archangelo, which played a critical role in the piagnone system of welfare, while in the seige of 1530, Marco di Giovan Battista degl'Asini (1542 -74) had argued strongly in the Great Council in favour of taxing clergy and charitable institutions. Keeping an eye on all such individuals was the new magistracy's first Presidente, Angelo Marzi de'Medici, Bishop of Assisi and secretary to both Duke Alessandro and Cosimo. He had served on an ecclesiastical tribunal that had judged opponents to the regime after the 1530 restoration, yet in spite of this he was seen by at least one prominent piagnone, Francesco d'Antonio de'Ricci, as a fair-minded moderate. On the whole, most signs indicate that even those with a piagnone past had since demonstrated their loyalty to the new Medici regime. (17)

These statistics and biographies demonstrate that the Bigallo captains were on the whole a group of loyal political heavyweights: they were the personally powerful scions of traditionally powerful families, broadly experienced in Florentine and Ducal government, adept at gaining honors and position, and normally enjoying long terms of service with the Bigallo. On paper, their influence increased over time: while Cosimo I and Francesco I appointed new men and old, insiders and outsiders to the Bigallo, Ferdinando I overwhelmingly favoured well-established senators and knights of Santo Stefano. Why then did this high-powered group have such mixed success in realizing its ambitions for the Bigallo?

These ambitions went far beyond immediate measures against poverty. Cosimo I's suppression of hospitals and the Bigallo in 1542 was not his first effort at reforming poor relief. Two years before, in the midst of serious famine, he had appointed Francesco Cavalcanti and Francesco Inghirami as "commissari et provveditori de. ... poveri mendicanti" (commissioners and proveditors of the begging poor), with a broad mandate "di disponer provedere et ordinare in benefitio commodo et sublevamento deli detti poveri" (to order, provide, and manage in benefit [the] accommodation and subvention of these poor). (18) Both Cavalcanti and Inghirami were members of the Compagnia di S. Maria della Misericordia, and had served terms as the Misericordia's Capo di Guardia during the critical period of 1527-28 when that confraternity was Florence's chief agency battling the plague. (19) Their immediate mandate was finding and rationing food supplies in the 1540 famine, but as that crisis faded, Cosimo I apparently aimed for a les s ad hoc approach to poor relief. The two provveditori's appointment had stated that it was the particular responsibility of every good, wise and just prince to charitably provide for his poorest citizens, a duty which, according to Elena Fasano Guarini, both Cosimo I and Francesco I saw as an indispensable justification for their rule. (20) It may have been around this time that an undated and anonymous Regolamento, discovered by John K. Brackett in the Pratica Segreta, was written. The document is filed with others dated from 1531 to 1543, and proposes a "spedale de Mendicanti di Firenze" for four types of deserving poor: the crippled, the blind, abandoned orphans, and -- more controversially -- the unemployed. Florentines would receive shelter, food, and spiritual assistance aimed at helping them reform; non-natives would receive alms before being sent away from the city. (21)

Protestant and Catholic civic governments across Europe were attempting similar ambitious reforms of poor relief that would rationalize resources and screen recipients with an eye towards helping the helpless and training or disciplining all others. All shared the underlying conviction that relief was a civic and a lay responsibility both because the force of law might be needed to marshal resources and shepherd the poor, and because clergy ought to focus their energies on pastoral care and worship. In Lyons, this plan was advanced from 1532 by an alliance that included the prominent piagnone exile, Fra Santi Pagnini, ex-prior of San Marco. Lyon's examinations, relief vouchers, and aid distribution resembled the established practices of Florence's Buonomini di San Martino, whom Pagnini had served. But there were piagnone precedents closer to hand, notably during the Republic of 1527-30 when among other innovations, a five-member commission -- the Ufficiali di Sanita -- had been vested with broad powers to req uisition buildings and food supplies in order to help with the growing number of the poor. This commission had swept beggars off the streets and deposited them in various shelters across the city; orphaned and abandoned children went to the Sala di Papa in S. Maria Novella, while indigent women lodged in the Medici stables next to San Marco. That said, there was nothing uniquely piagnone about welfare reforms, and many other Italian cities undertook this "new philanthropy" without Savonarola's model or inspiration. (22)

With their confraternal background and provveditorial office, Cavalcanti and Inghirami were likely authors of the anonymous Regolamento; its existence demonstrated the discussions circulating in the early 1540s about Florentine charitable policy when Cosimo I was planning the expanded Provveditori sopra li derelitti e poveri mendicanti in 1542. Both Cavalcanti and Inghirami were among the first five appointments to the magistracy (although Cavalcanti died before he could take up his duties), and the magistracy itself was unusual in that one of its first tasks would be to determine its specific activities within the rather broad mandate that Cosimo I had given. (23)

The first Captains set to work over the summer of 1542, and by September had fleshed out their mandate along the lines found in the anonymous Regolamento. They established house rules and staff for a central orphanage, set out regulations for begging (including the licenses which they would issue), appointed a functionary to distribute bread in the prisons, began planning the survey of existing charitable institutions, and projected the clerical staff: three notaries, a book-keeper (camerarius & depositarius), a Conservator for the children, nine Visitors & Procurators over the begging poor, a Co-adjutor, and two clerks. (24) In November, Cosimo I engineered the transfer to the magistracy of the possessions, obligations, and title of the Company of S. Maria del Bigallo, one of Florence's oldest (est. 1244) and wealthiest confraternities with a prominent headquarters on Piazza San Giovanni. This expropriation was aimed primarily at funding the ambitious project of a "spedale de poveri derelicti," but Cosimo ma y also have hoped to placate the patrons of ecclesiastical ospedali by making the new body look less like a secular magistracy. A month later the Captains formally took possession of the old Ospedale Broccardi on Via San Gallo from the Arte dei Mercatanti. They had used the building since March to house Florence's new central orphanage for boys, the Ospedale degli Abbandonati. (25)

Despite all this activity, the Captains immediately encountered difficulties. Local hospital patrons and administrators resented and resisted the new body, and frequently ignored its demands. A decree of August 1542 ordered all ospedali to submit detailed accounts of properties, investments, revenues, and costs, together with inventories of beds and bedding, and descriptions of the cultic and hospitable activities they undertook. This was the initial inventory of resources common to charitable welfare reforms across sixteenth-century Europe. It met a distinctly underwhelming response: one ospedale complied. A year later, armed now with a papal bull confirming their power of oversight, the Captains demanded that the information be submitted within ten days. Fourteen months later, they had reports on only 104 ospedali, with a suspiciously small number of these under clerical control, Of those reporting, two were owned by guilds, three by other ospedali, four by parishes or monasteries, nine by local communes, t wenty by confrarernities, 35 by private families; in 31 cases the ownership was unknown or undeclared. (26) All were very small: 76 declared a total of 214 beds, and the remaining 28 either had or reported none (by contrast, there had been 180 beds in the twelve ospedali under the direct control of the old Bigallo confraternity). The results of this first survey were transferred into a single volume where they could be readily consulted and easily updated for continuing oversight of the ospedali.

There were further problems ahead. By 1550, the Captains were writing to Duke Cosimo I, pleading poverty and seeking confirmation of their authority to visit, audit, and supervise the hospitals under their governance, to remove those administrators and patrons who could be proven fraudulent, and to go to court in order to recover alienated properties. (27) They repeated the request in 1558. In both instances they received the confirmation they requested, but something more was clearly at work. The original plan necessitated a large paid staff, and judging by the appeals of 1550 and 1558, this had not materialized. When merging the magistracy and the Bigallo in November 1542, Cosimo I had deliberately ordered an end to the practice of paying the Captain-magistrates. It would appear that this extended to the Visitors as well, since the 1550 appeal resulted in funding only the position of a single Visitor. As for the large staff envisioned in 1542, the 1558 appeal succeeded in freeing funds only for a deputy-cle rk to assist the one who was apparently the magistracy's only paid administrative employee (i.e., beyond the orphanage staff). (28)

One Visitor and two clerks did not a bureaucracy make, even if overseen by a dozen well-connected patricians. In order to update and expand the inventory of charitable resources and to assert their supervisory authority, the Captains kept tabs on the ospedali in three ways. Most commonly, they asked the local capitano or podesta to conduct a survey of the institutions in his district and to report to the Bigallo on proprietorship and personnel, the number of beds, the hospitality offered, legacies and their obligations, general income and expenditure, and total holdings. These duties progressively expanded to include complete inventories at the end of a spedaliere's or spedalingo's term, and efforts to ensure that a replacement be appointed only with the magistracy's approval. (29) While the co-operation of these captains and podestas was part of the original legislation, it could not be taken for granted; these were all representatives of the Florentine patriciate who engaged in personal (and often profitabl e) negotiation and clientalism through their tenure, and who were not always willing to sacrifice their own local interests for the purposes of a marginal magistracy. (30) Particularly in these early years, the Bigallo captains sent blistering missives to local officials asserting their authority, and obsequious appeals to Duke Cosimo asking him for support.

The second means of contact with ospedali was through direct correspondence: new spedalieri and spedalinghi were to be confirmed in their office by the Bigallo, outgoing and incoming spedalieri and spedalinghi were to submit reports, accounts, and inventories, and any local reviews of administration were to be passed on as well. This direct correspondence became effective only gradually, and was always hindered by the fact that some spedalieri and spedalinghi did not wish to acknowledge Bigallo oversight, while others co-operated only as a means of drawing the magistracy into local disputes about their authority, particularly their access to properties and revenues. The third means of contact was on-site by Bigallo Visitors: this was harder and rarer because the Bigallo's budget allowed for only a single Visitor until at least 1578, and not the seven which its first members had hoped for in 1542. Spedalieri and spedalinghi provided accommodation and meals, and were to cover travel costs as well, though it cou ld be hard to wring this out of them unless the Visitors had been called in by these administrators to help settle a local dispute. (31)

While the Captains succeeded in gaining some recognition of their authority in certain smaller communities, larger institutions and towns stubbornly resisted their efforts to audit accounts and approve administrative appointments. Yet local resistance was only part of the problem. The Medici dukes failed to fund some elements of the mandate, and deliberately refused the magistrates permission to fulfill others. Beyond those of 1550 and 1558, appeals for confirmation of their powers in 1574, 1576, 1579, 1581, 1582, and 1591 received occasionally positive responses but little concrete positive action. (32) Beyond the stillborn system of eight Visitors of the Poor, the attempt to survey and license beggars failed to get Cosimo I's support, and when the Captains revived the notion in 1577, Francesco I also rejected it. In 1550, Cosimo I ordered the Captains to drop their subsidies to Florence's single conservatory the Ospedale delle Abbandonate; after the intervention of his wife Eleonora of Toledo, the conservat ory was recast and entrusted to a newly formed confraternity, the Compagnia di S. Maria Vergine by 1552. Twenty years later (1574), the Captains approached Francesco with a plan to care for orphaned girls, but were explicitly refused permission to expand into this area. (33) The work of the charitable representative in the prisons figures in the first account book for 1542 through 1545, but there are no further references in later Bigallo records. (34)

While withholding from the Bigallo the funds needed to perform its duties, all three Dukes passed some of its duties over to other magistracies. In 1556, Cosimo ordered the Otto di Guardia e Balia to find a shelter for the abandoned girls who were being assaulted in the streets and marketplace. More significantly, in 1561, all lay charities and pious groups in the Domain were subject to audits by the Nove Conservatori della Giurisdizione e del Dominio fiorentino, the successor to the Cinque Conservatori del Contado e del Distretto and the Otto di Pratica. The Nove Conservatori was a magistracy given many of the powers and personnel that the Bigallo Captains had unsuccessfully sought, and as we will see below a comparison of the two gives an idea of what Cosimo I in particular seems to have learned from the Bigallo's ambitions and difficulties.

Francesco I's actions were more ambiguous. Through the 1570s, the Captains lobbied for permission to license beggars and open a workhouse on the model of Bologna's Ospedale dei Poveri Mendicanti, at one point going to the extent of having a sample beggars' license drawn up and printed. (35) The Grand Duke refused, continuing to see this as "too great an undertaking." Francesco I's caution was understandable. From 1575-80, he was facing a banking crisis in Florence generally, an escalating financial crisis at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in particular, and repeated complaints from the Bigallo itself that poor returns from Tuscan ospedali left it chronically short of funds. Against this, the immediate costs of the Captain's disciplinary poor relief plan were daunting, while its promised long-term savings were merely hypothetical. (36) By 1580 the Captains turned their attention to the more modest task of supervising ospedali, and here Francesco I at least seemed more supportive. They abandoned the unenforceable concept of appropriating 'excess revenues,' and adopted a graduated table of taxes levied according to an ospedale's revenues, with poorer hospitals charged more (up to 30%), and richer ones less (14% or even less). (37) Two years later, they complained to Duke Francesco I that most spedalieri and spedalinghi were appointed without necessary Bigallo approval, and that few ospedali rendered annual accounts, let alone funds. A number of positions on the magistracy were vacant, some Captains did not appear at meetings, and the Bigallo seemed headed for collapse. Francesco I accepted the Captains' suggestion that he designate three of their number as special deputies to prepare a comprehensive review of all ospedali and their holdings, only the second such review attempted since the magistracy began. (38)

Deputies Giovanni Battista delli Asini (the son of one of the original twelve Captains), Benedetto di Uguccioni (mentioned above as one of Francesco I's favorites), and Carlo di Luigi Martelli received their mandate on January 7, 1583, and were assigned a clerk and two messengers. They worked hard, meeting every day or two, and generating the usual flurry of letters to the duke, to

civil servants in the dominion, to hospital administrators and others. With perhaps an eye for the sleeves-rolled-up symbolism that we associate with modern reformers, in 1586 they requested and received permission to meet in their civilian clothes because it took too long to rush home and put on their robes of office when pressing business arose suddenly. (39) Seeking to draw the duke into the Bigallo's work, they voluntarily sacrificed the magistracy's power to appoint local spedalieri, and passed nominations for these posts on to the grand duke for his approval, perhaps calculating that this adaptation of the procedures followed by the Nove Conservatori in appointing local cancellieri might actually enhance the Bigallo's authority. (40) Their first goal was to tackle the perennial problem of getting ospedali throughout the dominion to remit funds in order to run the main orphanage of the Abbandonati in Florence. Early in 1584 they sent a form letter to all podestas and captains ordering them to complete surveys of the goods and properties of all ospedali under their jurisdiction. Over the next six years report after report came in from many, but not all, territorial jurisdictions, until the commissioners had accumulated seven filze of approximately 1000 pages each. A derelict ospedale was merged into the Abbandonati, and individual spedalieri and spedalinghi were assessed fines, thrown off properties, or sent to the Bigallo's own jail; at least one wrote to the Grand Duke seeking transfer to the Stinche, where at least he could beg for alms. (41) Suspecting that misappropriations went higher than the local level, the Three Deputies sought and obtained permission to review the account books of the Arte de Mercatanti and the Order of Santo Stefano, and to probe the records of the Decima, S. Maria Nuova, and the Camera degli Atti.

The investigation was moving into sensitive areas, but Francesco I died in 1587. Among the early memos to his brother and successor Ferdinando I was one from the Bigallo Captains themselves complaining that the Three Deputies had overstepped their bounds, and that their high salaries diverted the magistracy's money from the poor. While it is possible that some Captains feared that they would be implicated in the Deputies' widening probe, they more likely resented the fact that even the little authority left them had been entirely usurped by the Three, whose attention had turned from reform of rural ospedali to reform of the Bigallo itself. Ferdinando I agreed; he discharged the Deputies, removed them from the magistracy and appointed five new Captains to vacant positions. (42) The comprehensive survey envisioned by the Deputies remained incomplete, and though reports continued to come in, they were never consolidated into a single volume or arranged so as to facilitate comparison of inventories, accounts, and reports submitted for single institutions at different times. (43)

Francesco I had offered confirmations of Bigallo authority over the Ospedali of Prato and Pistoia, and of their right to review the alienation of any goods by the subject ospedali, yet in light of his desultory style, it is difficult to know whether this support amounted to anything. (44) The appointment of the Three Deputies at the Bigallo's request in 1583 could be taken as a sign of Francesco I's support. Yet when the magistracy attempted in that same year to prosecute a clear case of fraud in Florence itself, Francesco I supported the spedalingo over his magistrates. Costantino Talani, spedalingo since 1555 of the Ospedale di S. Caterina di Talani in Via S. Gallo, had run a foul of his relatives when he married in January 1583. The original Talani legacy required that the spedalingo, elected by family members from among their own numbers, be both single and resident. The institution he headed was among those Florentine charities which seemed oriented mote to helping the founding family than to aiding the poor: the ospedale consisted of a three-room house for the poor, and a far larger casa del spedalingo, complete with garden and stable for the spedalingo and the staff which the legacy required him to have. Costantino Talani certainly treated it as a sinecure. He hadn't lived in the casa del spedalingo for years, claiming that it was unhealthy and so was he; he may have been alluding to S. Caterina's brief period as a syphilitic's infirmary in 1520. (45) This didn't prevent Talani from renting part of the casa to Bernardo Carcarelli for use as an osteria, or from finding at least seven other tenants for various other rooms. The marriage was apparently the final straw, since Costantino's own brother and cousin now denounced him to the Bigallo and sought to have him replaced.

It was a golden opportunity for the Bigallo Captains, many of whom would have known Talani both from his membership in the Order of S. Stefano and for the fact that he treated S. Caterina, a prominent ospedale on a major street, more as a private investment than a public trust. This was precisely the kind of mismanagement that the magistracy; and more recently its Three Deputies, had been erected to police. A rapidly launched investigation turned up numerous irregularities and debts, and while the Bigallo did not immediately dismiss him, it levied a twelve scudi fine and demanded the account books in order to check Talani's dubious claims that he had brought the hospital back from ruins at considerable personal expense since taking it over in 1555. The Bigallo Captains could check their own records and see that in 1543 it had been functioning with four beds and a woman to receive poor females. (46) They approached Francesco I with the details of their investigation thus far, but were beaten to it by Talani, w ho had moved as rapidly as his accusers and judges, and apparently had the advantage of better connections both locally and abroad. On 23 November 1583 the Grand Duke, making much of Talani's status as a Cavaliere di S. Stefano, confirmed his right to the ospedale and ordered the Bigallo to return the fine and forget about auditing the books. A week later, papal confirmation of his possesso came from Rome, negotiated through the Contessa Caterina de Nobili, mother-in-law of papal nephew Iacomo Boncompagni. (47) Judging by Talani's own account book, much of his investment in the hospital over the following year was limited to repairing rental properties, while his income and expenses had more to do with commercial trade than with offering hospitality. (48) The Bigallo would return to the case in 1671 when the Talani line died out, but Cosimo III blocked it once again, and the magistracy did not gain control over S. Caterina until the late eighteenth century. (49)

Ferdinando I succeeded his brother on the ducal throne in 1587. While he took a far more active interest in the work of the Bigallo over the three decades of his reign, he restricted himself to the care of abandoned children and fulfillment of testamentary duties. He seemed unimpressed with the power to appoint local spedalieri and routinely approved Bigallo nominations. When sent a list of ten nominees for the post of spedalingo of S. Eiusto in Marradi in 1593, he turned it back with the note that the Captains choose whom they saw fit. The Captains won permission to discipline parents who abandoned their children at the door of the orphanage (such parents might be sent to the galleys), but had no success fulfilling the old goal of sheltering the poor and disciplining beggars. (50) A long memo delivered on the eve of the crushing famines of the late 1580s and 1590s reminded the Duke of Cosimo I's ample mandate empowering the Bigallo to supervise and discipline the poor; yet when Ferdinando I adopted some its proposals in 1591 by evicting "foreign" beggars and opening two shelters for local deserving poor, he entrusted the work to Giovan Battista Botti, the brother of high-ranking bureaucrat Matteo Botti. (51)

The paradox of the Bigallo magistracy from 1542-1609 is that the progressive rise in status and influence of its individual Captains had no discernible impact on its efforts to convince the Medici Dukes to allow it to exercise its original mandate. Designed as a centralizing magistracy, and staffed with patricians who shared this vision, it was nonetheless marginalized by three centralizing Dukes who never troubled to formally restrict its scope. Some of the reasons for its failure may lie in its relations with institutions in the Florentine dominion.

The Bigallo supervised large and small ospedali. Its efforts to dictate the administration of such large institutions as Prato's Ospedale del Ceppo generated enormous local resistance which is beyond the scope of this article The Ceppo in Prato was itself a centralizing institution in its own context, run by patricians who shared the ideology of the Bigallo captains, but who attempted to use their local charitable institution as a means of resisting Florentine claims and pocketing ospedale revenues.52 This was common enough in sixteenth-century Italy. Bologna's charitable ospedali helped preserve the local authority of Bologna's patricians in the wake of constitutional revisions imposed by Julius II (1503-1513) and Leo X (1513-1521), while Bergamo's Misericordia and Treviso's S. Maria dei Battuti confraternities and ospedali gave those towns scope for local autonomy and patronage under the over arching control of Venice. (53) Each of these cities and towns shared a commitment to centralization and rationaliza tion in charitable relief, and saw consolidation of local charitable efforts within a single institution as a means of augmenting local authority and thereby compensating in part for the loss of political autonomy.

The small ospedali found in the villages on Tuscan hills and valleys served a different purpose, and it is there that we find the greatest contrast to the 'new philanthropy'. (54) We can see this by briefly reviewing five from villages around Florence. Their operation tells something about the perception of charity and the purpose of charitable institutions in small villages, and their relations with the Bigallo reveal the limits of the magistracy's methods and assumptions.

Perhaps chief among the Bigallo's assumptions was an institutional anticlericalism. The Bigallo Captains believed that their best efforts were undermined by local hospital administrators and patrons like Costantino Talani, but saved particular venom for the clergy. Cosimo I had realized that placing ecclesiastical ospedali under the supervision of a lay magistracy was a dubious exercise. He had accordingly bought support for his original plan from Archbishop Andrea Buondelmonti and Pope Paul III by putting the magistracy under the Presidency of a Bishop, and by promising that all dealings with clerical hospitals would have to be cleared with him personally. (55) The status of their President did not shake the Bigallo Captains' conviction that clergy were the most fraudulent of all patrons and administrators. In their correspondence with three dukes over 70 years, they frequently re-iterated the need to keep them on a tight rein. Early correspondence included the efforts to extend their own supervision of acco unts over ecclesiastical ospedali, but the larger issue was ensuring that no priests were appointed as administrators of a lay ospedale. Formal memoranda of 1550 to Cosimo I, of 1576 and 1579 to Francesco I, and of 1595 to Ferdinando I set out the Bigallo Captain's consistent argument against clerical ospedale administration: clergy failed to offer the same level of charitable hospitality, and sometimes offered none at all. They neglected to submit accounts for auditing, but they pocketed surplus revenues meant for support of the orphanage in Florence. They refused to recognize the Captains' supervisory authority and they claimed ospedale property as their own. Absent from these memoranda was the criticism frequently voiced by Savonarola and echoed by the piagnoni that priests ought to keep to pastoral work and leave public affairs to laymen. The Captains warned that an ospedale under clerical management would eventually be lost to the magistracy. Apart from the memoranda, they fought repeatedly to overturn i ndividual appointments, and painted the darkest picture possible of clerical administration." Was this dim assessment valid and, if so, did locals consider the Bigallo magistracy an effective remedy or acceptable alternative?

To return to the place where we began, Don Lorenzo Ricordati took over the Ospedale di S. Maria Maggiore in Buggiano in 1557. The account book that he began in that year testifies to twenty years of difficult rebuilding, but also charts a gradual process of expropriation of just the kind that the Bigallo Captains feared. His tenants paid their rents annually at harvest time in quantities of grain, olive oil, and cash. (57) Against these rents, Don Lorenzo had a considerable number of expenses. Apart from the initial cost of repairing the roof and door, local carpenters came in regularly to build or fix furniture, while the muratore made necessary repairs to the walls. The greatest regular expense that related to hospitality lay in bedding: every year Don Lorenzo bought quantities of lombard cloth which a local seamstress turned into sheets and mattresses. Since some of his tenants were sharecroppers, Don Lorenzo annually bought seed, and occasionally made larger investments like the ten lire paid for 30 olive trees in 1561. In all, a significant amount of the collected revenues circulated back to Buggiano's artisans, merchants, and laborers, because they were reinvested in the ospedale and its properties. Finally, there were the taxes or tributes: annual sums totaling just over ten lire paid to the local camerlingo of Buggiano, to the Rector of the Badia in Florence, and to the tax farmer who collected the decima which all charitable institutions paid for the University in Pisa. (58)

There were other expenses. Every few years, the Abbot of the Badia in Florence made the rounds, and Don Lorenzo prepared for this visit by having a new set of sheets, and sometimes even a new mattress made to dress the Abbot's bed. The costs and the visit are always linked in the account book, a mark of either pride or resentment. (59) The Captains of the Bigallo also periodically requested that the local podesta review the property and Don Lorenzo's hospitality. Just as there is a hint of resentment in the periodic record of new sheets for the abbot's visit, so there is a touch of the ridiculous when the podesta is described in the book as having arrived "at the order of the Bigallo," and with all his "corte" -- small revenge of the bookkeeper when Don Lorenzo had to feed this Florentine worthy and his band of soldiers. (60) Both the abbot and the podesta could order improvements to the building, and did so regularly.

Don Lorenzo seems to have been eminently conscientious, and the Captains of the Bigallo eminently churlish in their blanket dismissal of such priest-spedalieri as rapacious frauds. And yet after collecting rents from his sharecroppers for twenty years, Don Lorenzo abruptly turned them all out in 1578. Suddenly, only one tenant is recorded as making the payment on the properties formerly worked by the familiar local names. That tenant pays cash, and no longer receives the grants of seed that the sharecroppers had collected annually. More tellingly, the tenant is Lucantonia Ricordati da Buggiano, a close relative certainly, and possibly even Don Lorenzo's father. The rent begins to rise precipitously. While Lucantonio Ricordati pays 105 lire at first, the lease moves over to his son Mattio and rises to 140 lire in 1582. Two years later, Lucantonio's worker (lavoratore) is the tenant, paying 147 lire. (61) And there Ricordati's account book abruptly ends. The next Bigallo review, carried out by Buggiano's Cavali ere Alessandro Rizzoli just a few years later in 1588, showed a dramatically deteriorated situation: widow Madonna Calle offered lodging in two rooms outfitted with a couple of poorly-made beds with sheets, blankets, and quilt that were all described as "cattivi" (nasty). (62) There is no reference to properties of any sort, normally a critical component of all such inventories.

While Don Lorenzo Ricordati may demonstrate the kind of spedaliere about which the Bigallo Captains frequently warned the Medici dukes, the magistracy did nothing to reverse his apparent expropriation of ospedale properties. This normally would have occurred when a new spedalingo entered the scene, as Ricordati himself would have known only too well from a dispute being played our at the same rime in a nearby ospedale in the same jurisdiction, and reported in a series of letters to the Captains of the Bigallo. The Ospedale degli Innocenti in Stigniano had been under the care of a priest, Michele Spandoni. But at the end of his term in November 1580, the community prepared a slate of four candidates and in May 1581 elected a layman, Jacopo Guelfo da Stigniano. Don Michele refused to surrender the ospedale or even account for its holdings, triggering a standoff that lasted for a year. At that point, the podesta took matters into his hands by sending his troops to occupy the ospedale so that Jacopo Guelfo could rake possession and determine what its properties and possessions were; they took Don Michele into custody and he finally ceded everything to Jacopo Guelfo in June 1582. (63) The push for direct action in this instance came not from the Bigallo, which had the authority to order it, but from the local community This was not unusual, as a roughly comparable situation somewhat later demonstrated.

While Buggiano's Don Lorenzo was turning out his sharecroppers in the late 1570s, Giovanni Fondati was taking over as the spedalingo of the Ospedale of S. Giuseppe di Valsavignone, near Borgo S. Sepolcro, 75 km. southeast of Florence. S. Giuseppe also had two beds, supported by a few fields worked by tenant farmers. Fondati worked more closely with the Bigallo as he sought to reverse the kind of expropriation of property carried out by Don Lorenzo in Buggiano and Don Spadoni in Stigniano. Fondati's predecessor had been a priest, Don Battista Soveri, and this cleric, too, had managed to install his brother Giovanni Annibale Soveri as a tenant on ospedale property. This, it seems, was conventional in Valsavignone: another priest-administrator fifty years earlier had recorded quite openly how he had hired his two brothers and a sister to cultivate the hospital lands, repair the hospital fabric, and supply the hospital food. The new spedalingo Giovanni Fondati may have had just such an arrangement in mind for his own siblings or children, but had to contend with the fact that his predecessor's brother didn't plan to leave the land; worse, this brother claimed title to the fields in question. Fondati paid the Bigallo to send legal summonses to Soveri and others he thought involved in the fraud. From 1578 through 1583, at least seven summonses went out to an ever widening circle of defendants. Fondati aimed beyond Giovanni Soveri to his brother, Battista the priest and former spedalingo; to a local man who had testified that Giovanni owned the land; to the local pievano, for having taken property of people who had died in the ospedale. The Soveri failed to respond to the Bigallo summons, leading Fondati to take more direct action by paying the police to arrest his predecessor Don Battista. After hunting through a few local alberghi, they did finally seize the priest, and with that Soveri resistance seems to have crumbled. (64)

Fondati's accounts for the first five years of his tenure are filled with matters relating to this case and little else. Most of his expenses of almost 400 lire were devoted to pursuing the case: paying for Bigallo Visitors to confirm his property rights, paying for witnesses, getting copies of legal documents, paying for summonses. At the end in spring 1585, he sought to clarify matters by depositing a large cache of relevant documents in the Valsavignone archive, noting in his account book that this was a precaution against the day when he would die. There followed a review of his administration by the Bigallo, and, not surprisingly, his reappointment as spedalingo. The last item in the account book is one of the few which relates to the Ospedale's raison d'etre: on 25 March 1588, he paid fifteen lire to a local woman to sew up some sheets for it. (65)

The Bigallo captains frequently complained to the Medici dukes about greedy priests appropriating properties, and these three accounts seem to confirm their suspicions: priests usurping properties, or passing them on to relatives, or refusing to leave at the end of their contractually limited terms as spedalingo or spedaliere. Yet these accounts also show that the Bigallo was not particularly adept at policing or reversing such frauds. One seems to have gone unchecked, and two were resolved only when the spedalingo or community took the initiative and had the podesta arrest the offender. This was at a time in the 1580s when the investigative activities of the Three Deputies were generating a flood of local reports to the Bigallo, but in light of their reforming activities, Bigallo inaction at this point is even more puzzling. Were similar problems encountered with lay administration?

The fourth ospedale, that of S. Maria Maddalena in Ponolano 50 km. northeast of Florence, demonstrates both close community involvement and a determination to spread benefits as widely as possible. A committee of three appointed the spedaliere to a limited term, with possibility of reappointment following a close audit of the accounts. From 1560 to 1565 (and again from at least 1571 to 1573) a local man, Raphaello di Gabriello supervised the two-bed ospedale and the cultivation of its properties. In place of sharecropping, the ospedale hired a series of laborers to work its fields and harvest the minimal amounts of orzo, spelt, chestnuts, legumes, and grapes that they generated. (66) The local priest received payment for saying mass and for celebrations on the feast of Mary Magdalene. The hospital annually spent significant amounts hiring porters to bring abandoned infants to the larger ospedale of S. Eiusto a few kilometres away in Marradi. Passing children on to S. Eiusto kept S. Maria Maddalena's costs dow n, and the ospedale took advantage of an accumulated surplus to build a shop in l564. (67) At the end of Raphaello di Gabriello's first term, the syndics who reviewed the accounts determined what part of the spedalingo's income was legitimate, and what portion had to be repaid to the community, since revenues properly belonged to the community and not to him individually. (68) Ponolano's S. Maria Maddalena was dearly administered to be as much a community resource as a charitable operation.

A final example confirms some of this picture of the lay ospedale. Gabriella di Gianfranco Biancarelli, the spedalingha of the Ospedale of S. Joseffo in Foiano, roughly 25 kilometres southeast of Florence, appears in the Bigallo records as a nervous supplicant. Having received a summons from the Captains in 1586 ordering her to render both accounts and overdue levies, she writes an obsequious letter that paints a familiar picture: she is widowed, poor, old, and continuously infirm.69 The Bigallo's summons struck her as a bolt from the blue, since she had understood from the testament of the Ospedale's founder, Agnelo Mazzarelli, that the spedalingo was to have full and free use of its income, and so she did not think that she had to pay the magistracy. Having claimed ignorance, she immediately undid her own defense by reminding the magistrates that her son had brought a copy of this same testament to them in Florence only a year before, and that a check of the archives would confirm her freedom; she had, it s eems, seen some handwriting on the wall. Such an archival investigation could also have confirmed for the Captains that she had been appointed as much as ten years earlier, the choice of a local committee of three intent on finding some subsistence for the poor local woman. (70) Her willingness to embroider the truth renders her enclosed financial account suspect: it shows an ospedale which is not only small but, on the face of it, a loosing operation. It is difficult to know how much of the grain offered by tenants as rent in kind went to the poor or, for that matter, how much of the wine, oil, wood, meat, and clothing that she purchased; it is also not clear if the unnamed paid helper who was so critical to the operation of the ospedale was the same son whom she had mentioned. (71)

These were only five of hundreds of rural Tuscan ospedali, but they practiced charity differently from the Bigallo. The Bigallo, an odd hybrid of state magistracy and expropriated confraternity, attempted to appropriate local resources in order to fund a charitable institution in Florence that would discipline and support the poor of the whole state more efficiently It was never particularly successful, even after abandoning the efforts to claim excess revenue in favour of a straight tax on ospedali. The resistance it encountered was in part institutional defensiveness, but was also rooted in a different mentalite. For locals, this was not simply a hotly resented intrusion into local autonomy, though of course it was that. It was also an approach to charity which they neither shared nor understood. In all five cases the charitable ospedale was the incorporated form of local charity, less an institution to be audited and supervised than the charitable face of the whole local community. (72) Actions which the B igallo magistrates saw as examples of fraud (e.g., spedalinghi engaged in self-dealing, temporarily assuming control of patrimonies, or monopolizing income; clerics as spedalieri), could be seen locally as unremarkable traditions of charitable care in that 'economy of makeshifts' that paid priests and kept poor widows and families alive, as in Buggiano and Foiano. (73) Locals certainly did not seem to share the Bigallo's concern with clergy heading lay ospedali. They were less concerned with the abstract issues of Church and State than with the practicalities of cobbling together a living for the priest. In spite of the examples of Buggiano, Stigniano and Valsavignone, there are numerous examples of clerical spedalieri and spedalinghi giving way without controversy to lay successors. Rotating the position of spedaliere or spedalingo among various deserving local poor, particularly if the term had a limited duration of three, five, or ten years, ensured that more could expect to receive their turn in due cours e, as in Ponolano and Valsavignone; rural communities frequently rotated everything from mezzadria contracts to administrative offices in this way. (74)

Trouble arose when an individual or family refused to step aside so that others could take a turn, as in Valsavignone, or when they attempted to appropriate holdings or failed to share employment opportunities and resources, as in Buggiano and Stigniano. This didn't simply rob an institution; it robbed a whole community of a valuable resource. When ospedali hired local workers, tilled local farms, paid local taxes, patronized local merchants, and conducted local ritual activities, the money stayed in the community, benefiting the descendents of the original legators. This is not to say that fraud and misappropriation were not real problems. Locals strongly fought the appropriation of these communal resources by individual spedalieri, turning to the courts or police when necessary. So, for example, by 1592 the commune of Buggiano had retrieved the properties usurped by Don Lorenzo Ricordati and his family, though it did so by means unclear and apparently without recourse to the Bigallo. (75)

Locals were wary of drawing the Bigallo into their fights, in part since it was not a particularly efficient magistracy and in part because it was not clear whether the Bigallo would rake their side or, if its Captains referred the case on to the duke, what the outcome would be. (76) The Bigallo's drive to have excess revenue (itself an odd concept) funneled to support larger charitable institutions in Florence violated the principles of caritas (family/kin first) and compaternitas (community first) which had given birth to these ospedali. The culture clash is reminiscent of Antonio Pini's description of the medieval city as made up of the citta di pietra (streets and buildings) and the citta vivente (people and activities). (77) The Bigallo Captains generally treated local ospedali as though they were part of the citta di pietra -- institutions to be adapted, expropriated, and rationally deployed to the betterment of the whole state. Local communities considered these ospedali as part of the citta vivente -- living traditions of charitable care rather than institutions. They were incorporated into the life of the community, and continually adapted to maintain its integrity as needs changed from generation to generation. Elsewhere in Italy, the exercise of charity could define the boundaries of a community. As Angelo Torre has shown for Piedmont, jurisdiction in many rural areas was established through the ritualized exercise of redistributive charity: communities were defined not as territory but as the group of people from whom food was collected and to whom it was redistributed in common feasts. Particular human communities had distinct jurisdictional rights and competences, but these might overlap geographically, with individuals and families belonging to more than one. The result was a patchwork of fragmented and overlapping jurisdictions which Savoyard and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regularize by establishing parallel standardized institutions and rituals for governance, charity, and worship. (78)

Across Italy, charitable institutions were a significant focus of disputes between central authorities seeking to expand their control, and local authorities seeking to resist it. Cosimo I seemed to recognize quite quickly the roots of local resistance and the problems of the Bigallo, and applied these lessons when devising the new magistracy for governance of the dominion, the Nove Conservatori, in 1560. A comparison of the two is revealing since their jurisdiction overlapped on a number of points, though the new body was far more successful in having its authority recognized both in the city and in the dominion. The Nove Conservatori avoided the difficulties encountered by the Bigallo in its efforts to survey and supervise local ospedali, gave Cosimo I better access to the information he desired, and eventually gave his descendents better access to their revenues. It was, according to Elena Fasano Guarini, one of the critical bodies that extended central bureaucratic control through local communities into t he eighteenth century. (79)

Unlike the Bigallo, the Nove Conservatori had a predetermined mandate, and salaried members selected personally by the Duke from the Senate, the 200, and the citizenry to serve six month terms. It had a network of appointed officials, including most notably the cancellieri to oversee local administration -- known, even when nominated locally, as the 'eyes' of the Nove Conservatori -- and a corps of bureaucrats in Florence who received and processed their reports. From 1565, all of these were also appointed directly by the Medici government. Within a decade, firm disciplinary action by the Medici established the practice that local councils could not operate in the absence of the cancelliere, and that even judicial and security officers like the podesta, vicar, and captain, had to co-operate with him. The cancelliere, and the Nove Conservatori behind him, had to establish in each locality the balance sought by the Medici between preserving local statutes and customs (a key to binding the localities to ducal ru le) and preserving ducal authority. With its semestral turnover of magistrates, the Nove Conservatori became to some extent a rubber-stamping body between the corps of established and rotating bureaucrats and the Medici dukes who appointed them. (80)

Beyond such administrative distinctions, these two magistracies in the center had very different approaches to peripheral localities that suggested, if not different purposes, at least a different strategic accommodation of local mentality. Both had the task of auditing local charitable and pious institutions and ensuring that these did not violate the trust of testators or ignore the needs of the poor. To this end, both conducted surveys of local charitable-religious resources. (81) The Bigallo surveys singled out ospedali within the local communities with the stated aim of supervising, auditing, and taxing them. The Nove Conservatori surveys were more comprehensive yet less demanding; they registered confraternities together with ospedali as integral parts of the local community and recorded the names, resources, and administrations of these, but made no immediate claims to supervise or tax them. The former survey raised suspicion, resentment, and avoidance; the latter encouraged localities to list the char itable institutions as part of their strength, identity, and self-reliance. It is not surprising that the Bigallo with difficulty turned up 104 institutions in its first survey, while the first Nove Conservatori survey of 1562 turned up 379, and one the year later revealed 1,008. (82) There are practical explanations for the difference. The Nove Conservatori could rely on its own officials while the Bigallo depended on the cooperation of resentful spedalieri and pre-occupied podestas and captains. The Nove Conservatori census surveyed only lay institutions, while the Bigallo was continually preoccupied -- and frustrated -- in efforts to extend authority over clerical ospedali and spedalieri. Yet at a more profound level, the Bigallo survey reflected the rational, centralizing, secularizing aims implicit in 'new philanthropy' while the Nove Conservatori survey accommodated the mentaliti of communal charity or compaternitas.

Locals were under few illusions as to the ultimate purpose of the Nove Conservatori survey, and resisted both it and the new magistracy. Yet it also allowed them to present their community as a strong and cohesive whole, worthy of being left alone to manage its own affairs. (83) In the context of Medici bureaucratic expansion the Nove Conservatori's approach to ospedali represented a strategic advance in the form of an apparent retreat: the bureaucracy released its grasp on particular local charities so as to gain a surer hold on the whole community. (84) There was some precedent for this in Florence's relations with its outlying towns. Samuel Cohn has argued that around 1402 serious rebellions and depopulation endangered Florence's hold on border communities and led it finally to accede to longstanding demands to cut local administrative costs, ease taxes, expand immunities, and consolidate local debts. By reducing their demands on these communities, Florence's rulers won greater compliance. (85) The Nove Co nservatori also appeared to be less of a departure from past practice of territorial governance than did the Bigallo. Republican Florence had always accepted a degree of local judicial autonomy as normal in a dominion constructed more as a loose federation of communities recognizing Florentine sovereignty than as a unitary state bound by a single constitution. Subject communities retained local laws and councils, and sent ambassadors to the Florentine Signoria if they believed that the treaties governing their entrance into the Dominion had been violated, if the cost of the relationship had become too onerous, or if a Florentine official was harsh or corrupt. A Florentine captain or podesta was a member of the politically active class, and negotiated within these local constraints. He employed persuasion and patronage as much as force because he had a dual purpose; he served the state by preserving law, order, and tax revenues, but served himself by building up both wealth and a client base that could be usef ul on his return to Florence. Both purposes dictated that he not alienate powerful local families or undermine the institutions they controlled. The result, as Andrea Zorzi notes, was that informal clientelism was not the alternative to institutional governance, but was the very form that governance took. (86) The Medici did nor challenge this approach quite so much as they worked to position themselves at the center of the clientage network; this required a readiness to retreat -- or to appear to retreat -- if legislative, bureaucratic, or fiscal initiatives generated too much resistance on the part of local clients. These comparisons suggest that we need to look beyond poverty and charity to gauge the Bigallo's broader significance. While it had little success in changing Florentine charitable institutions or social policy, its troubled relations with local communities in the 1540s and 1 1550s gave Cosimo I concrete lessons in what to adopt and what to avoid in his relations with the Dominion, lessons which he applied when establishing the Nove Conservatori in 1560.

The case presented here may appear to impose an overly Machiavellian reading on a situation which could also be read in more mundane fashion as an example of the sheer difficulty of implementing early modern bureaucracy over determined local resistance. Arnaldo D'Addario has argued that the Medici intended the Bigallo to be a centralizing body, but were frustrated by local resistance and ineffectual Captains. John Brackett has argued in a different context that it was the dukes' own cheapness and inconsistency that undermined these centralizing goals. (87) We certainly have to be aware here of the "political economy of makeshifts;" the dukes pursued power more than ideology and improvised a limited welfare system with the institutions and people at hand. (88) Yet perhaps with the Bigallo a further political strategy was at work, and that was the approach of keeping a magistracy afloat while steadily trimming its sails.

This was not a deliberate policy consciously applied by three successive dukes over six decades. Rather, three enduring practical realities shaped the dukes' sometimes improvised decisions, and lent a degree of consistency in the absence of clearly stated policy. First, the makeshift system of Florentine poor relief, shared among many guild, confraternal, and private institutions, was normally adequate to handle most situations apart from periodic famines and plagues and care for young children. A great overhaul of charity like that found in Venice, Bologna, Rome and other cities could be delayed, but a large orphanage was a more pressing necessity. (89) Second, the Bigallo's ambitious life-term Captains were potentially more disruptive to Medici rule than the rotating magistracies, because the Captains, as secularizing representatives of the old patriciate or even closet piagnoni, more directly threatened local autonomy in ways certain to aggravate local communities whose ospedali revenues simply were not wo rth the political cost. Third, if it were maintained as a quasi-confraternity with a panoply of public cultic and ritual activities and some opportunities for small scale patronage, the Bigallo could be a convenient way of rewarding such ambitious, office-hungry loyalists without devolving much real power. These three continuing realities informed the three dukes' minds as they deliberated the recurring Bigallo appeals for greater authority, and allow us to make sense of the contradictions between what the Medici did and what they left undone. They confirmed the Bigallo's supervisory powers, but failed to give it the resources to exercise them. They allowed it to set a broader mandate with respect to surveying the poor, licensing beggars, and operating a workhouse, but refused it permission to exercise that mandate on a number of occasions. They deliberately passed the Bigallo's mandated duties on to other magistracies under their more direct control at particular points in the 1550s, 1560s, 1570s, 1590s, and in 1620 (when the long-envisioned poorhouse was finally opened under state control). Most particularly, they gave the Nove Conservatori the powers, the staff, the salaries, and the disciplinary support that the Bigallo had long requested and never received for a job which was, in some respects, almost identical.

While the Bigallo Captains had a vision of a centralized state whose Florentine magistracies would subdue localities and control marginal groups, the Medici dukes had a vision for personal survival and expanded recognition of their authority through Tuscany. The vision of rural ospedali, if we can call it that, was more modestly to maintain the local poor and help out the occasional travelling stranger. Medici' absolutism was based fundamentally on negotiation and compromise; in this particular instance, the Captains negotiated with the Medici, but the Medici were more intent on negotiating with the Duchy. To adapt Andrea Zorzi's distinction, the Captains were obsessed with "administering a state" while the Medici were fixed on "governing a dominion." (90) The situation has clear parallels to that of magistrate Beltramino Cusadri, whose efforts to uphold with 'rough justice' Gonzaga rule in Mantuan territories and Este rule in Modena and Reggio, were repeatedly undermined by Gonzaga and Este pardons and privi leges to the very disruptive nobles and localities that Cusadri was trying to bring to heel. (91) Reading the situation as simply an example of failed bureaucracy doesn't help us to understand the Medici's contradictory policies with respect to the Bigallo, or why Bigallo's power steadily fades even as the status of its individual Captains steadily rises. These apparent contradictions make far more sense when read in light of what we know about the strategies of negotiated absolutism: avoid unnecessarily aggravating local interests, give the appearance of accommodating particularity while putting alternative bureaucratic structures in place, and use positions and sometimes empty honors as a means to bind friends and win over waverers. (92) By the mid-seventeenth century, the Bigallo Captains themselves finally capitulated to the Medici vision, receiving their positions gratefully, accepting their limited mandate unquestioningly, and fulfilling their duties indifferently.

(1.) Archival abbreviations employed in the footnotes: AAF = Archivio arcivescovile (Florence). ASB = Archivia di Stato (Bologna). ASF = Archivio di Stato (Florence). BNCF = Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence) BRMF = Biblioteca Riccardiana/Moreniana (Florence). Dares have been adjusted from Florentine to common style, with the year beginning on January 1 rather than March 25.

(2.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fol. 200. ASF Tratte 725, fol. 150r. Mecatti, 131, 191.

For Don Lorenzo's election and confirmation: AAF Ospedali, OS 01.05, fols. 316r-319v. Though the Ospedale was subject to the Badia, its previous rector had been a layman, M. Stefano d'Antonio Macmi (fol. 317r). For the account book recording his management: ASF Bigallo, 1553, "S. Maria Maggiore di Buggiano, 1558-1584", fols. lr-l0v; 40v-55v.

(3.) Cosimo I's patente establishing the magistracy was issued 19 March 1542, and approved by Cardinal Antonio Pucci (27 June 1542), Archbishop Buondelmonti (17 October 1542), and Paul III (18 July 1543). ASF Bigallo 1669/II, fols. 35r-38r. Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 6v, 9v. For transcriptions of the documents: Passerini, 800-12. In their first year, the magistrates were called variously Provveditori, Dodici Buonomini, or Sindaci. ASF Bigallo, 55, filza 23 #33 (letter of 2l-III-1542 from Cosimo I to "Sindaci sopra li poveri"). For suppression of the Bigallo on 17 November 1542: ASF Senato dei Quarantotto, 5, fols. 13v-15v. This latter text refers to the group in conventional Florentine fashion as the "XII boni homines." See also: Lombardi, 1982, 165-70; Terpstra, 1999, 106-121. Richa, 7, Pt. 3, 254-65.

(4.) Pullan, 177-208.

(5.) On the need to understand 'center' and 'periphery' operating within broader 'systems of power,' see Fasano Guarini, 1999, 174-76.

(6.) Berner, 162-84.

(7.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 70r-71r.

(8.) ASF Bigallo 157, #201, 202, 203 lay out the process of three-way consultation from 15 December 1595 through 26 March 1596 under which Bishop Alessandro Marzi Medici was nominated by the Archbishop of Florence and appointed by Duke Ferdinand I. The boundaries of the diocese of Fiesole reached into central Florence, and the Bishop's palace was not far from the Bigallo's headquarters. Comerford, 27-37.

(9.) Among administrative magistracies, the Pratica and Abbondanza had 8 members, and the Pupilli and Grascia 5. Among financial magistracies, the Dogana had 4 members and the Decima 3; the Monte Commune had 10 and the Monte di Pieta 8, but in both cases these served short terms on rotation. Among judicial magistracies, the Buonomini di Stinche and the Ruota had 5 members, the Mercanzia 6, the Onesta and Guardia e Balia had 8, but again these larger magistracies had members serving limited terms in rotation. Litchfield, 74-5.

(10.) In March 1591, the Captains protested to Ferdinando I that the magistracy had been forced from the time of its merger with the Bigallo to submit any plans for alienating properties to the SS. Priori for approval; they argued that this was inconvenient, expensive, time consuming, and inappropriate for a magistracy, and further proposed that they be permitted to submit their plans to the Duke alone. The request was not approved. ASP Bigallo 142, #643B; Bigallo 1669/IV fol. 45r-v.

(11.) For what follows: ASP Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 199r-203v. ASP Tratte 725. Gamurrini; Mecatti; Litchfield, 339-382.

(12.) Promotion to senate sometimes came after appointment to the Bigallo: 9 of Cosimo I's 16 (56.25%), 2 of Franceso I's 8 (25%), 11 of Ferdinando I's 22 (50%). A significant minority were the first senatorial appointments in their families: 5 of 16 appointed by Cosimo I, none of Francesco I's appointments, and 6 of 22 appointments by Ferdinando I. On patricians, the 200 and the Senate: Berner, 148-58, 170-84.

(13.) On the court and the Order of Santo Stefano: Berner, 232-38.

(14.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fol. 200v. ASP Tratte 725, fol. 55r. Gamurrini, vol. III, 292-302. Mecatti, 131, 163-4.

(15.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV fol. 200v. ASF Tratte 725, fol. 83r. Mecatti, 132, 224. Gamurrini, 2, 61, 64.

(16.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV fol. 201r. Mecatti, 133, 161. Gamurrini, vol. 1, 492-94.

(17.) Of Cosimo 31 appointees, 10 came from families with some Piagnone connection (Giovanni di Banco Albizzi, Marco di Giovan Battista degl'Asini, Francesco di Antonio Bandini, Luigi di Giuliano Capponi, Bartolomeo di Zanobi Carnesecchi, Francesco di Girolamo Inghirami, Alessandro di Antonio Malegonnelle, Orlandino Orlandini, Francesco Ruccellai, Agnolo Sacchetti), though only the 3 noted above had been directly associated. ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, 200r-v; ASF Tratte 725. Polizotto, 34, 195, 223, 314-34, 378, 394, 415, 446-60. Aranci, 76.

(18.) ASF Magistrato Supremo 5, fol. 62r-v. (13-III-1540).

(19.) BNCF Poligrafo Gargani 539, #164 (Francesco di Giovanni Cavalcanti); 1068 #91 (Francesco di Girolamo Inghirami).

(20.) ASF Magistrato Supremo 5, fol. 62r. Fasano Guarini, 1977, 520.

(21.) ASF Pratica Segreta 184 (F). Brackett, 2000, 5.

(22.) Polizzotto, 347-48, 408-09. Pullan, 177-204. Terpstra, 1999, 97-106.

(23.) ASF Bigallo 1669/II, fol. 27v. IV, fols. 4r, 5v. For more on the local context for these actions, Terpstra, 1999, 106-119.

(24.) ASF Bigallo 1669/II, fols. 26v-29r. Gosimo I's bull appointed 5 captains, with an additional 7 appointed in August.

(25.) ASF Senato dei Quarantorto 5, fols. 13v-15v. The suppression of the Bigallo on 17 November 1542 should be seen in the context of various senatorial legislation of the previous half year which constituted a program aimed at securing the moral and physical defense of the realm, induding plans to refortify towns (14 April 1542, fols. 2r-4r), to confirm tax revenues for the Gompagnia della Misericordia (28 June 1542, fols. 6v-7v), to increase penalties against sodomy and blasphemy (7 July 1542, fols. 7v-9v), and to consolidate rule over the Florentine Romagna (23 August 1542, fols. 10r-12r). The Senate had not been involved in the initial appointment of the magistracy in March 1542.

(26.) ASF Bigallo 1671, fol. 48r. Summaries of the reports are contained in ASF Bigallo 1360.

(27.) ASF Bigallo 142, #643 (report of 28 March 1550).

(28.) By 1618, the staff was limited to a cancelliere, provedittore, camadingo, and ragioniere, whose duties were maintenance of the books for the magistracy and the orphanage of the Abbandonari. ASF Bigallo, 1669/IV, fols. 70r-71r.

(29.) Generally, the spedaliere was the ospedale administrator and the spedalingo was the resident warden, yet in practice the terms were used interchangeably; usage in this study reflects the documents for particular communities and ospedali. For an example of a printed notice sent to local administrators spelling out their duties vis a vis the Bigallo: ASF Bigallo 1237, fol. 467r. If the podesta or captain experienced any difficulties with ecclesiastics, they were to remind these that the Bigallo operated under the Presidency of the Bishop of Fiesole, and with approval of Pope Paul III.

(30.) De Angelis, 166-73. Salvadori, 209-17, 220-24.

(31.) As we will see below, Giovanni Fondati, spedalingo of S. Giuseppe di Valsavignone 1577-86, was confirmed in office by the Bigallo magistrates (for the sum of 2 lire) in 1577, on the eve of a long fight to gain possession of the ospedale properties. Three distinct documents for confirmation cost him a total of 14.10 lire, and he paid a further 37.6.8 lire the following year for a visit by two Bigallo representatives to confirm the ospedale possessions. He paid this as part of the strategy sketched out further below for regaining control of ospedale properties from the previous spedalingo: ASF Bigallo 1646,fol.34v.

(32.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV,fols.26r-46v.

(33.) ASF Bigallo 155. Helping girls in 1574 (fol.6r). Licensing beggars refused 11 March 1577 (fol.40r). On conservatories and the Compagnia di S. Maria Vergine: Terpstra, 2000, 118-127. The Bigallo finally began construction of a conservatory in 1618: ASF Bigallo, 1669/IV, fol.46r-v.

(34.) The Bigallo's representative in the Stinche prison was a 'Perugino,' paid 7 lire per month in salary, and reimbursed for additional expenses in providing bread and other necessities to the poor in the prison. ASF Bigallo, 1679, fols. 38r-55v.

(35.) "Regolamenti sopra Deputazione dei Poveri Bisognosi dal 1647 al 1677," ASF Pratica Segreta 184, fols. 10r-11v (untitled/undated proposal for a Florentine Ospedale del Mendicanti which adopts key details of Bologna's Ospedale dei Mendicanti); fols. 41r-48v (handwritten copy of 1573 draft statutes for Bologna's Ospedale dei Poveri Mendicanti); fols. 51r-53v (11 March 1577 request to Duke for permission to license beggars, together with example of a printed license). The presence of a 1573 draft of statute revisions for Bologna's Opera dei Mendicanti suggests particularly close contacts between the Bigallo Captains and Bolognese magistrates, since the latter's revised statutes were not adopted and printed until 1574. The 1573 draft: ASB Istituto di Cura e Riposo Giovanni XXIII, Opera dei Poveri Mendicanti, Cartone 2, #3. The 1574 printed text: Statuti dell'Opera de poveri mendicanti della citta di Bologna novamente riformati & ampliati. (Bologna: Gio. de Rossi, 1574). The Bigallo's proposed beggar's licens e (fol. 52r) read: [blank for date] "NOI Syndachi Proveditori & Procurati & padri per sua excellentia deputati sopra li derelitti & mendicanti della Citta & stato di Firenze Diamo & concediamo licentia a [blank for name] Per tempo di (blank for time period] che possa andare Mendicando per detta Citta salve che per le chiese mentre si celebrano li divini offitii. Ma si bene possi stare fermo di dentro o di fuori alla porte di esse con accattare da chi entra & escie li limosine. Et sia Ricevuto in tutti li spedali di detta Citta per detto tempo gratiosamente. Faccendo le divote orationi da noi in essi spedali imposte & ordinate altrimenti non possino in quelli dimorare ne essere ricevuti, &c." The terminology used for the issuing body refers directly back to that used to describe the two Provveditori appointed in 1540, and the original magistracy appointed in 1542. The request was penned on 11 March 1577; the response on 20 March 1577 was "non e da entrare in questa cosa. Che sarebbi troppa grande impresa." ASF Bigallo 155, fols. 40r-41r.

(36.) At the same time, the Medici Dukes' practice of drawing large sums our of institutions like the Innocenti and the Monte di Pieta was responsible for a good deal of the economic crisis in charitable institutions: Gavitt, 265-270. Menning, 262.

(37.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fol. 91v. Ospedali with revenues of 10-20 lire were charged 3 lire, those earning 20-30 lire were charged 5 lire, up to those earning 90-100 lire (charged 14 lire). Those with revenues above 100 lire were charged a flat rate of 21 lire. This tax was no easier to collect than the 'excess' revenues had been. ASF Bigallo 1113, fols. 81r-82r gives a record of 27 December 1580 noting receipts from only 40 ospedali in 28 communities.

(38.) In 1579, Francesco I had authorized a similar 9-person commission to reorganize the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Gavitt, 264-269. The Bigallo Captains' appeal included a suggested form letter that could be sent to all ospedale administrations ordering them to submit accounts of income and expenditure annually in October for review by a separate commission of people to be elected by the Bigallo Captains: ASF Bigallo 1669/IV fols. 34r-36r (19 March 1582)

(39.) ASF Bigallo 22; 1669/IV, fols. 34r-44r; 200r-203v. Like the Innocenti commission of 1579-80, the Bigallo commission was to take a year to review the accounts of all spedali; in fact, it sat for five years until Ferdinand I disbanded it in 1588. Delli Asini had succeeded his father as a Bigallo magistrate in 1574 (one of Francesco I's first appointments), and was himself replaced on the commission by Cav. Bernardo di Marco da Ricasoli 4 January 1585. Carlo di Luigi Martelli (1580) and Benedetto di Uguccioni (1582) were the most recent appointees to the Bigallo. All four were replaced on the Bigallo between 1588-1590. On the Deputies' staff and request regarding robes: ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 36v-42v.

(40.) This constituted a rapid reversal, since the Three Deputies had insisted on the Bigallo's authority to appoint local spedalieri in a report of 5 May 1583, but passed the nomination of a spedalingo on in August 1584: ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 38v-39r; Bigallo 155, fols. 356r57r. Appointment of local cancellieri had passed from the hands of the Nove Conservatori into the duke's hands by an order of 1565. Fasano Guarini, 1977, 518-19.

(41.) ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fol. 44r.; ASF Bigallo 157, #26, 38, 38b. Matteo d'Andrea del Grosso, spedalingo of S. Eiusto di Marradi, was charged in 1582 with having defrauded 500 scudi, and subsequently imprisoned. He appealed to Ferdinand I for transfer to the Stinche in 1588, and the Bigallo spent the next five years trying to sort out the ospedale's holdings before replacing him in 1593. Ibid, #38b, #163.

(42.) ASF Bigallo 157, #22, #29.

(43.) The inventories initiated by the Three Deputies are contained in two ASF Bigallo series: Inventari d'Ospedali: 1357-59 (206 responses from 1584-85), and Visite d'Ospedali: 1237-1356. Dates for relevant volumes of the latter series: 1237 (1585-86); 1238 (1586); 1239 (1586-87); 1240 (1588-89, identified on the cover as "6. Filza Sesta di visite"); and 1241 (1588-89, identified on the cover as "Filza setttima di Visite"). The series of reports continued to 1752, by which point it numbered 119 flize.

(44.) ASF Bigallo 157, #29, 36, 59. 1669/IV, cc. 41r-v. On Florentine control of Pistoia's Ospedale di S. Maria del Ceppo: Connell, 302.

(45.) S. Caterina and S. Rocco were two ospedali on Via S. Gallo used by the Compagnia di SS. Trinita upon its founding in 1520, until its own eponymous ospedale for syphilitics was opened a short time later. Talani was most likely simply seeking a pretext for his preference to live outside the ospedale complex. Yet at least one contemporary medical authority, Niccolo Massa (1489-1569), wrote that the French pox could be spread through various forms of non-sexual contact ranging from infected exhalations, to food and drink, and even clothing and bed sheets. While Massa did not think the pox could remain virulent over three decades, Talani may have combined his theory with the popular belief that contagion could infect the very walls of an ospedale. Originally written in 1532, Massa's De morbo Gallico was widely reprinted and sometimes distributed together with texts by other authors in composite editions such as Morbi gallici curandi ratio exquisitissima... (Basel: 1536). Arrizabalaga, 161,234-51, 270-71. Nut ton, 225-27. Quetel, 55.

(47.) BRMF ms. Palagi 245, fols. 5v-9v.

(46.) BRMF ins. Palagi 245, fols. 2r-3v. Talani offered only five beds for the poor in place of the nine stipulated in the will, 90 scudi in taxes and 107 ducats of the Decima due to the University of Pisa were unpaid, and a commitment to give 100 lire annually to Orsanmichele hadn't been paid in years. In 1543, the ospedale had four beds and a woman who offered hospitality to women. The spedalingo was Lorenzo di Bartolomeo Talani: ASF Bigallo 1700, fol. 5r.

(48.) BRMF ms Palagi 245, fols. 25r-30v. The bulk of income comes in two payments from a Benedetto Grechaiuolo, while expenses include payments to porters transporting goods to ships in Pisa, and also a payment to Talani's wife Lisabetta Bonsi. One of the few related to the ospedale's hospitality is lire 57.10 for 80 braccia of cloth purchased to make pairs of sheets for the four beds.

(49.) Passerini, 648-58.

(50.) The Bigallo's own role in ratifying local appointment of spedalieri and spedalinghi was by no means yet clear but seemed gradually to be winning acceptance by the 1590s. From January 1590 through April 1595, it received notice of 55 appointments, the most determined locally and sent to the Captains for information; 21 of these were forwarded to the Grand Duke with nominations and were routinely approved. ASF Bigallo 157, #87, 89, 93, 98-9, 101-2, 104, 106, 111, 117, 121-2, 138, 144, 151, 153, 156, 160, 162-3, 169, 175-6, 179, 184, 187, 192. ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fol. 44v (27 November 1591).

(51.) The Bigallo's memo: ASP Bigallo 157, #22. The 'foreign' beggars were expelled to work on the Belvedere fortress, while Florentine male paupers were sent to S. Marcho Vecchio, outside the Porta S. Gallo, and Florentine women and children were sent to the Ospedale di S. Onofrio, close to the Fortezza del Basso. Lombardi, 1982, 169-72.

(52.) Control over the Ceppo had long been a factor in internal Pistoiese politics and in relations with Florence. Battles between the Cancellieri and Panciatichi factions over control of Pistoiese ospedali had precipitated civil war in 1499-1502, and provided the pretext for expanding Florentine authority. Connell, 200-244. Salvadori, 212-13.

(53.) Terpstra, 1999, 100-101. d'Andrea, Cossar, 94-102. Knox, 142.

(54.) For an overview of the particular conditions faced by rural ospedali: Balestracci, 40-

(55.) Archbishop Buondelmonti approved the plan on 17 October 1542, and Paul III on 18 July 1543. Presidents appointed 1542-1609: Angelo Marzi de'Medici (1542), Bernardo Bartolini Medici (1546), Lodovico Serristori (1552), Matteo Concini (1564), Francesco Diaceto (1564), Alessandro Marzi de'Medici (1595), Bartolomeo Lanfredini (1605). ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, Lois. 9v, 14r-16r, 199r.

(56.) ASF Bigallo 142(28 March 1550); Bigallo 155, fols. 49r, 102r-v, 121r-v, 182r; Bigallo 157 #194 A, 13, C (1 June 1595; l July 1595); Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 31r-32v.

(57.) From 1557 through 1577, grain receipts varied from 20.5 to 33 stale, oil between 2 and 8.5 libbre, and cash between 1 and 27 lire. Part of the variation is accounted for by the fact that most tenants were sharecroppers, and part by a substitution under which some paid cash in place of grain. In addition, Mona Maria Salutati of Florence annually sent 1 lire "per suo livello." ASF Bigallo 1553, fols. 1r-10v. For the number of beds: fols. 40r, 52r.

(58.) The decima for the Studio in Pisa was fixed at 6 lire, 2 soldi; the annual censo to the Badia was within a few soldi of 1.10.0 lire, and the stime paid to the comune of Buggiano ranged from 2.17.0 lire to 3.15.0 lire. ASP Bigallo 1553, fols. 40v-55v. At no point in the record of uscite does Don Lorenzo note a payment of any kind to the Bigallo.

(59.) E.g. ASF Bigallo 1553, fols. 39v (1558), 41r (1561), 42r (1562), 43v (1563), 55v (1584).

(60.) Local communities paid the costs for their Florentine overseers, and had long fought to reduce the size and cost of the capitano's or podesta's 'famiglia.' In the fifteenth century, the famiglia of a capitano of a larger town like Pistoia could number over thirty members and include a judge, accountant, notaries, pages, heralds, guards, attendants, horses, and groom; the famiglia of a podesta, made up of notaries and attendants, ranged from four to seven. De Angelis, 172.

(61.) ASF Bigallo 1553, fol. 10r-v. Some ospedali patrons preferred renting over mezzadria arrangements because the former was more stable and easier to administer and gave more opportunities for skimming off profits. Connell, 166-69.

(62.) ASF Bigallo 1240 #84. But see below n. 69.

(63.) ASF Bigallo 890, #224, 277, 341, 356. These events are reported in letters of the Podesta to the Bigallo magistrates; the Podesta says nothing of the contemporary changes in Buggiano, which is also under his jurisdiction. Ten years later, the community once again elected a priest as spedalingo, and the Captains confirmed it without comment: ASF Bigallo 157, #138.

(64.) ASF Bigallo 1646, fols 34r-42v. Fasano Guarini, 1979.

(65.) ASF Bigallo 1646, fols. 34r-42v. In the audit done by four community representatives at the completion of his 1577-86 term, Fondati's expenses were pegged at 393.01.00 lire, and his income at 501.00.00 lire.

(66.) ASF Bigallo 1606, fols. lr-2v.

(67.) Ibid., fols. 3r-5v.

(68.) Ibid. fols. 15r-18r. The surplus of revenue over expenses between 1571-73 was 408.19.0 lire, of which Raphaello di Gabriello was ordered to repay 167.2.4 lire.

(69.) ASF Bigallo 55 "Filza 4a di Memorie, Lettere, e Ricordi del Bigallo," #40.

(70.) It is not certain when Biancarelli was appointed, though the Bigallo had requested a report on the ospedale from the Podesta Antonio di Francesco Strozzi in November, 1576, and received a reply dated 22 December 1576 that a local committee of three had met and appointed the daughter of a local man, a woman aged 40 who was very poor; Strozzi does not give her name. ASF Bigallo 890, #60.

(71.) Gabriella Biancarelli's account notes income of 36 staia of grain, 2 staia of vegetables (legumi), 9 barrels of wine, and 6 boccali of oil; expenses for the spedalinga, her assistant, and 2 poor guests ("per dua bocche") include 25 staia of grain, 12 barrels of wine, 18 lire for meat, 10 lire for sheets, 10 lire for wood, 8 lire for oil (for lamps), and 20 lire for clothing.

(72.) Balestracci, 37-49. Fasano Guarini, 1994, pp. 167-170.

(73.) Hufton, 69-127.

(74.) Balestracci, 52-3, 56-8. Cohen, 1998, 194-5. Fasano Guarini, 1977, 505-518. Salvadori, 212-13.

(75.) When confirming the local appointment of a new lay spedalingo for S. Maria Maggiore on 18 July 1592, the Bigallo noted that revenues were 22 scudi and expenses were 8 scudi; at contemporary exchange rates, this was equivalent to the rents charged by Don Lorenzo in 1584. ASF Bigallo 157, #144.

(76.) When in 1584 a new spedalingo had to be appointed in Castiglione Fiorentino, the Bigallo submitted to Francesco I a report on eight nominees which included information on each's involvement in local feuds, information which could only have come from locals themselves. The acting spedalingo, a well-connected doctor, was rejected for being "parziale" and having enemies; various needy individuals with dependents were passed over, and the position went to a gentleman with Florentine connections and independent means who had proven honest and reliable when acting as cancelliere some years before. ASF Bigallo 155, fols. 356r-57r.

(77.) Pini, 22-47. I am grateful to R. Cossar for suggesting the comparison: Cossar, 28.

(78.) Torre, 243-52.

(79.) "The Nove Conservatori del giurisdizione e del dominio fiorentino was instituted by decree of Cosimo I on 26 February 1560, replacing the Cinque conservatori del contado e del distretto (est. 1420) and the Otto di pratica (est. 1480). Anzilotti, 68-78. Fasano Guarini, 1977, 490-538. Burr Litchfield, 110-114.

(80.) The Nine members of the magistracy included 5 drawn from the Senate, 2 from the 200, and 2 from the city generally. Anzilotti, 68-78. The duties of the cancellieri were first codified in a "Libro di istruzioni per i cancellieri" adopted in 1575: ASP Magistrato dei Nove, fasc. 3595. Fasano Guarini, "Potere centrale," 496-519.

(81.) The Nove Conservatori's survey was ordered on 24 October 1561. Cosimo I's legislation noted that many more luoghi pii existed than had ever reported, and that the Nave Conservatori's survey was specifically to include the ospedali supervised by the Bigallo (though it said nothing of any jurisdictional precedence between the two). Accounts were to be gathered every three or five years, and maintained with the help of four clerks. ASF Cinque Conservatori del Contado e Distretto, 352bis, fols. 70r-74r.

(82.) Fasano Guarini, 1977, 504. We should not, however, exaggerate the effectiveness of the Nove Conservatori surveys: two major surveys of 1570 and 1590 missed the communities of Valsavignone, Stigniano, and Ponolano and, while including reports from Buggiano and Foiano, missed the ospedali discussed above. As a sign of the magistracy's expanding requirements, the 1570 survey included only the names of ospedali and confraternities and their administrators, while that for 1590 included more information on income and expenses. ASF Nove Conservatori deli Luoghi Pii, filza 1, Parte I(1570); Parte II(1590).

(83.) Printed manuals for chancellors of 1635 and 1678-80 emphasized the identification of the luoghi pii with the buon governo of the commune, and the authority of the cancelliere to oversee the economic, legal, and business affairs of both. ASF Nove Conservatorii delli Luoghi Pii, Inventory N52 TER, 9.

(84.) Cohn, 1999, 180. As a formal complaint of 1588 from "La Comunita et Huomini della terra di Prato" demonstrated, the Bigallo and the Nove Conservatori could issue competing claims to jurisdiction. The Pratese acknowledged that though Cosimo I's 1542 patente and Paul III's 1543 bull gave supervisory authority to the Bigallo, this body hadn't exercised any, and so the Conservatori had 'swallowed' it ("n'era ingerito"). The Bigallo's Three Deputies had revived claims to authority in 1583, and were refusing to approve appointment of a new spedalingo until the Pratese paid 4576 scudi in unpaid taxes and 'excess revenues.' The dispute carried on without clear resolution. ASB Bigallo 157, #29, 36, 59.

(85.) Cohn, 1999, 244-67.

(86.) Zorzi, 26. Black, 52-3. De Angelis.

(87.) d'Addario, 126-135. Brackett, 1992, 139-43.

(88.) Terpstra, 1999, 120-21.

(89.) Daniela Lombardi argues that this was the ease at least until the 1610s, when gathering economic and demographic crises finally overwhelmed existing charities and led to creation of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti: Lombardi, 1982, 165-170. Lombardi, 1988, 165-70.

(90.) Zorzi, 22.

(91.) Chambers and Dean.

(92.) Berner, 312-15, 350-56.

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Table 1: Bigallo Captains' Terms of Office

Duke          1-10 years  11-20 years  21+ years  Uncertain  Total

Cosimo I      11          13           5          2          31
Francesco I   7           6            1          0          14
Ferdinando I  9           9            6          2          26

Source: ASF Bigallo 1669/IV, fols. 199r-203v.
Table 2: Bigallo Captains' Political Standing

Duke          Appointed  Priorial     Council of   Senate
                         Families     200

Cosimo I      31         21 (67.74%)  25 (80.64%)  16 (51.61%)
Francesco I   14         10 (71.42%)  11 (78.57%)   8 (57.14%)
Ferdinando I  26         23 (88.46%)  24 (92.3%)   22 (84.61%)

Duke          Order of S.
              Stefano

Cosimo I      24 (80.64%)
Francesco I   12 (85.71%)
Ferdinando I  25 (96.15%)

Sources: See footnote 11