Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power. (Reviews).

William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi, eds., Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 357 pp. $69.95. ISBN: 0-521-59111-2.

The nineteen essays of this first collection dedicated to the Florentine territorial state represent a variety of Italian and Anglo-Saxon scholarly traditions, uniting hitherto separate streams of study; of the urban Renaissance, stressing cultural achievements and the drama of events, and of the history of the countryside, emphasizing patterns of economic and agrarian activity and demographic development over the longue duree. Samuel Cohn's contribution in particular insists that this union is vital to an understanding of local experience. The fusion indeed produces new perspectives on many familiar subjects, among them civic humanism, political ideology and its vocabulary; and personal patronage.

Although many different facets of the state are examined, the volume is unified by general consensus about key themes. That state-building and patronage were not incompatible, as long assumed, is demonstrated by most studies, especially those of Andrea Zorzi, William Connell, Patrizia Salvadori, Lorenzo Fabbri, and Francesco Salvestrini. Nor were public and private spheres of interest in practice divisible, as Giuseppe Petralia and Stephan Epstein observe. Both Robert Black and Stephen Milner describe a triangular relationship between the Medici, the Florentine state, and, respectively, Arezzo and Pistoia.

These findings cast new light on the significance for the development of the Florentine state of the rise to power of the Medici family. The city's territorial state was essentially created under the Albizzi regime, and in this sphere, continuity in the years before and after 1434 appears more significant than novelty. In many essays, a Medicean patronage network appears, appropriately, not as a fixed entity driving political developments in a predictable direction, but as a constellation of relationships frequently in flux, among men obliged to respond both to external influences and to internal change.

The bridge between the two streams of study is essentially the Florentine governing elite, the human focus of this volume. Officials of the territory were the major mediators in the reciprocal relations between center and periphery, primarily as administrators of justice, but also as patrons of client networks that extended to accommodate country as well as city. Their experience is brought to life by Connell, as embodied in Giannozzo Manetti, "The Humanist Citizen as Provincial Governor." Across the whole spectrum from public to private, officials implemented their city's policy to base Florentine rule on existing local laws and political and social practices, as emphasized by Jane Black and by Zorzi, who describes the territory as more a "great contado" than a state (30). Of course governors encountered conflicts in practice between loyalties to Florence and to their localities, complicating the definition and maintenance of honor. David Peterson, in an essay of magisterial scope, discusses the interests of the church and its role in the legitimation of the Florentine state.

Many essays are informed by the major work on the small, "organic," regional state of Giorgio Chittolini, who adds a concluding comment. He praises contributors for seeking "liberation from the problematics of the 'origins of the modern state,"' and thus "the necessity of measuring the progress of the state's action with respect to centralisation and absolutism" (338), focusing instead on everyday practical issues. At the same time, he insists upon the need to balance this new approach with studies drawing upon an older and illustrious scholarly tradition dealing with "the ideological and cultural dimension" of the Florentine dominion, as represented by Riccardo Fubini and Alison Brown; she contributes to this volume an analysis of the developing use of the word "empire," in fact almost always in response to practical contingencies.

Despite their interest in patronage, these judicious essays give no cause for Chittolini's general concern that the "Florentine experience" might be circumscribed within the "Mediterranean system." Conversely, little evidence remains in either writings or actions of the modern statist conception of authority or sovereignty (344) that he attributes to Cosimo de' Medici. However, important light is refracted upon Florence's general acceptance of Medici leadership by the "almost continual engagement in the city's political life and administrative affairs," including military matters, of a large number of its citizens, to which Laura De Angelis draws attention (169). That the ruling elite constituted a community of expert governors surely affected the quality of the republic, and explains much about the nature of Florentine political thought, by comparison with that of polities in which interest in these matters was more distant and theoretical.