The Government of Florence Under the Medici (1434 to 1494) & Republican Realism in Renaissance Florence: Francesco Guicciardini's "Discorso di Logrogno".

Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence Under the Medici (1434 to 1494)

Second ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xviii + 406 pp. $87. ISBN: 019-817418-7.

Athanasios Moulakis, Republican Realism in Renaissance Florence: Francesco Guicciardini's "Discorso di Logrogno"

Lanham, MD and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. x + 171 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-8476-8994-8.

The original 1966 edition of Nicolai Rubinstein's magisterial work on Medici control of Florentine government in the fifteenth century is well known to every historian of Renaissance Italy. The work under review here is a second and slightly revised and expanded edition. The revisions bring the citation of manuscript sources from the electoral records (the Tratte) in the Florentine State Archives into line with the reorganization and renumbering of the volumes in this collection carried out some years ago by archivists Paolo Viti and Raffaella Maria Zaccaria (the fruit of whose work is the published inventory, Archivio delle Tratte [Rome, 1989]). Rubinstein and his able collaborator in this revision, Giovanni Ciappelli, have saved future researchers seeking to locate the documents on which The Government of Florence is largely based the trouble of having to consult Viti's and Zaccaria's tables of concordances. The new edition also contains three new appendices: 1) pages 373-75, on the Council of Seventy inst ituted in 1480 (supplemented on pages 361-62 by a hitherto unknown list of its members in 1489); 2) pages 376-77, on the consultative committees known as the pratiche; and 3) pages 378-91, on the use of sortition in filling certain administrative posts of the city and the subject territories. The text of the work is, however, largely unchanged. Apart from some bibliographical and occasionally substantive additions to the notes, and a couple of sentences and phrases inserted in the main text, Rubinstein has not modified the argument, evidence, or conclusions of the original edition -- as no doubt befits a work that has long been a classic and a fixed point of reference for fifteenth-century Florentine studies.

The second of the books reviewed here is by contrast something new. Arhanasios Moulakis, known to students of Florentine history and humanism for his edition and presentation of Leonardo Bruni's Greek Constitution of Florence in the 1986 issue of Rinascimento, has translated Francesco Guicciardini's Discorso di Logrogno and introduced the text with a series of interpretive essays. The twenty-nine-year old Guicciardini wrote the Discorso on the proposed reorganization of the popular government in the summer of 1512 when he was serving as ambassador from Piero Soderini's republic to the court of Spain, in the very days in which the republic was falling to Spanish arms sent into Tuscany by Julius II's Holy League. Moulakis interprets the Disco rso from two perspectives. On the one hand, he sees it as the "culmination" of the evolution of Florentine government and political ideas, among the ottimati at least, toward a more "realist" conception of republicanism -- here defined as "a constitutionalism avant le mot that sought to cast the properly constituted body politic, not primarily in terms of ultimate normative foundations, but rather in terms of institutions and procedures capable of composing and furthering lucidly understood interests" (22), and in which "good government will be judged by its effectiveness in delivering desirable results" (17). At the same time he sees Guicciardini's memorandum as "a point of departure for a distinctively modern understanding of politics" (1) -- "a new departure" that rejects, not classical republicanism, "but the world of medieval social, political, and juridical norms," and thus a movement not "from republicanism toward the reason of state, but . . . to a distinctively modern republicanism" (20-21).

Moulakis wants to show that Guicciardini's way of thinking about government and its powers emerged from the "modernizing centralization" of "a pragmatically empowered oligarchic regime" (66) over more than a century under both the Albizzi and Medici parties: the increasingly important role of skilled administrators and bureaucrats who brought experience and expertise to the management of finances, diplomacy, and war; "a growing distinction between the governors and the governed" (65); and the erosion of "medieval" notions of both participation and liberty "in favor of a more pragmatic, narrower, and more forceful exercise of power" (69). Building on some recent rethinking of civic humanism by a number of historians, Moulakis sees this transformation of Florentine politics and political vocabulary as stretching from the late fourteenth century and from Bruni himself, through the Medicean dominance, to the ottimati of the early sixteenth century. But the unresolved question that surrounds this interpretation o f Florentine history, and of Guicciardini's early political thought, is whether we should see these developments as the product of growing "realism" -- as a pragmatic response to fiscal, military, and political exigencies -- or as the expression of class interests by ottimati who saw themselves threatened by both more radically popular forms of republicanism and by the centralization of power of which the Medici, and especially Lorenzo, were the chief expression. Moulakis himself points to the ambiguity: "Constitutional thought, as it emerged against the background of the Florentine political experience, represents an attempt at a comprehensive understanding of an articulated political whole...providing for sagely distributed and balanced powers, the rule of law, security of persons and property, careers open to talent, and the equitable distribution of honors and burdens. But at the same time it also appears as the advocacy and ideological cover of a regime with a specific, oligarchic social content" (24).

Moulakis seeks to reassure us that the political, bureaucratic, and fiscal reforms of the Albizzi and Medici regimes were "not just a matter of the privileged taking advantage of their position." But a convincing demonstration of this proposition requires more than the assertion (in the very next sentence) that the "Florentines were very much aware that the intricate operations on which their material and social wellbeing depended required a great deal of expertise" (65). Many Florentines might have agreed with this, but many also rejected Guicciardini's assumption that such expertise was more likely to be found among the members of his social class than elsewhere. Was it in fact "realism," or good old-fashioned class prejudice, that led him, in the Disco rso di Logrogno, to recommend reforms through which the Great Council and the office of the lifetime Gonfalonier would in essence have neutralized each other, while real power in his reorganized "popular" government would have gone to a Senate of "wise men and "the best citizens," at least half of whom would have been appointed for life? Florentines knew that this was coded language pointing to the families of the ottimati, like Guicciardini's own.

For all the considerable differences between these books, what they have in common is a reluctance to read the history of fifteenth-century Florentine politics and political thought in the light of class interests and antagonisms. Indeed, embedded in Rubinstein's meticulous explication of Florentine electoral controls and councils is a similar thesis of Medici constitutionalism -- the moderation of the reforms they engineered (e.g., 118), their respect for constitutional traditions, and the "almost pedantic concern with legality and technical efficiency" (143, 215). Here too we have an interpretation of changes in government and institutions as having been motivated not so much by class or group or family interests as by a presumed awareness, on the part of those who knew best, of what sort of concentration of power was necessary, and in whose hands, in order to make the whole function more justly and efficiently. Just to give an example: according to Rubinstein, the elimination of a fixed ratio of minor gui ldsmen among the forty co-opted members of the Council of Seventy, created in 1480 as the "supreme agency of control" (230) with a membership fixed for five years, "may... have been a concession to the ottimati; but it probably also reflects the desire not to let artificial social restrictions interfere with the selection of what were considered the most suitable councilors. Loyalty to the regime and administrative ability shown by past service were doubtless ... overriding considerations" (233). This sense of what motivated Lorenzo and his advisors in staffing the Seventy has evident similarities to Moulakis's view that concerns for efficiency, experience, and expertise were the driving factors in the concentration of power in fewer hands, both in the actual politics of the Medici years and in the constitutional theorizing of Francesco Guicciardini.

A final word on Moulakis's book: it is unfortunately marred by a surprisingly large number of typographical errors (missing words, misnumbered footnotes, misquoted passages, and garbled syntax) which occasionally make it difficult to read. More serious are the factual mistakes and incorrect dates, not only in appendix A (151-55) on the "Chronology of Florentine Institutional Development" (which, among other things, places the Sicilian Vespers in 1279 instead of 1282, misdates the wars against Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan to only 1397-1398 and those against Filippo Maria Visconti to 1421-1427, and puts the Florentine recapture of Pisa in 1507 instead of 1509), but throughout the text as well, where we find the origins of the "primo popolo" dated to 1244 instead of 1250 (43); the institution "of the Medicean Council of One Hundred in 1458" as having ocurred "in the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy" (58) -- which took place in 1478; the "fall and exile of the Medici" twice dated to 1484 instead of 1494 (25 a nd 80); and the "Medici restoration to power" dated to 1498 instead of 1512 (81). These are clearly slips -- in other places Moulakis gives the correct dates for most of these events -- but they will confuse some readers, especially students, and in any case detract from the important arguments that this book makes about Florentine history and political thought. One hopes they will be eliminated in a second edition.