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In the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli famously observed: ‘Our ancestors and those who were considered wise used to claim that it was necessary to hold Pistoia with factions and Pisa with fortresses, and consequently nurtured differences in several subject cities in order to keep hold of them more securely.’ What this assertion masks is a fundamental difference in the manner by which these so-called parte were managed during the course of the fifteenth century, for almost continuously between 1376 and 1457 Pistoia's offices were equally divided by statute between the societies of San Paolo and San Giovanni. The purpose was to secure civic peace through the equitable distribution of honours as enshrined in legislation. With the establishment of Medicean hegemony in Florence, however, the dissolution of the statutory ‘parte’ in Pistoia meant that communal peace was dependent on the impartiality of the Medici and their agents in their role as patron/arbitrators between competing elements within the Pistoiese elite. An examination of the Pistoiese case sheds interesting light on the changing nature of power brokerage within and between both Pistoiese and Florentine elites during the course of the Quattrocento. RECONFIGURING THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE In 1376 Florentine ambassadors annulled the Pistoiese's own civic reforms in an attempt to pacify the city, and mandated four commissioners to carry out a new reform to last six years, doubling the number of bags for the major civic offices from four bags per office, one per quarter, to eight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of urban history has increasingly focused on the reconstruction of ties of kinship, neighbourhood and the issue of social patronage generally. Although the conclusions reached have often differed, the result of such study has been the emergence of an image of Renaissance man bound into a multitude of social network systems that fundamentally conditioned both the practice and conceptualisation of daily life. More recently, patronage studies have moved beyond the walls of Florence itself to consider the city's territorial state, paying particular attention to the complex interrelations between the Florentines and the inhabitants of the subject communities. With the territorial expansion of the Florentine dominio, the numbers of Florentines in the cities and rural communities of Tuscany increased with respect to the recent past. Significantly, many Florentines occupied positions as resident judicial officials in the subject towns for a period of several months, whilst merchants and rich bankers invested capital in the fertile Arno valley and along the coast, or built their country retreats in the areas from which their families originated. Many of these Florentines demonstrated their growing interest in the territories by establishing private networks with the indigenous populations and they were often in a position to exercise influence over the political and administrative life of the subject towns themselves. The Florentine state of the Quattrocento was a recent phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether material conditions improved for the peasantry after the Black Death and into the fifteenth century remains an open question, not only for late medieval and Renaissance Florence, but for all of Europe. Historians of a Malthusian bent have seen an economic golden age for the peasantry following in the wake of fourteenth-century pestilence. From radically opposed perspectives, other historians such as the Marxist Guy Bois and the non-Marxist David Herlihy have also found prosperity for the peasantry at least in parts of Europe and for a portion of the fifteenth century. However, more recently still other historians with various methods and political agendas have argued the opposite: the fifteenth century saw at best continued misery, not recovery, for the Florentine peasantry. Yet, despite differences in political and methodological orientations, historians have posed these questions almost exclusively within the contexts of long-term social and economic causes; the affairs of state or politics more generally, especially at the level of specific events, largely have been left out. Was the condition of the Florentine peasantry during the Renaissance oblivious to changes in political regime - to the rise of the Albizzi's govero stretto in 1393 or the rise of the Medici in 1434? Or, did other political events have long-term consequences in shaping the fortunes of Florentine peasants? This chapter will present data from a series of tax records from twenty-nine sample villages in the rural territory or (more precisely) the contado of Florence, from the Black Death through the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewed over the span of a long fifteenth century, the histories of Florence, the papacy and the Florentine church align themselves into three distinct phases. First, the period of the papal schism corresponded to that of Florence's most rapid and extensive territorial expansion, and allowed the city's rulers to take the initiative in elaborating fiscal institutions, and a juridical apparatus, that circumscribed the operation of ecclesiastical institutions within their territory. The process reached its culmination in the codification of the city's Statuta (1415-18), and with the creation of its ‘catasto’ or tax inventory (1427). At the same time, such ‘state-building’ measures were complemented, and limited, by the policies of a governing reggimento which, shaken by the city's failed war of the ‘Eight Saints’ (1375-78) and the Ciompi revolt (1378) that framed the rupture of the papacy into schism (1378-1414), was also in the process of its own oligarchic consolidation. Rather than simply refurbish its old Guelf credentials, the regime deployed strategies aimed at appropriating directly the legitimating power of religion attaching to local ecclesiastical institutions. Second, over the period from the resolution of the schism at the Council of Constance (1414-18) to the Medicean parlamento of 1458, and Pope Pius II's promulgation of the anti-conciliar bull Execrabilis (1460), while republican-minded Florentine oligarchs came to terms with the emergence of Roman-financed Medici power, popes from Martin V (1417–31) onwards moved to suppress the conciliar movement, to build a territorial base in Italy and to reassert ecclesiastical prerogatives throughout the peninsula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the debate on the nature and outcome of the late medieval ‘crisis’ has taken a new lease on life. According to the more recent interpretation, the demographic and political ‘crises’ acted as a catalyst for structural changes that pushed the late medieval economy onto a higher path of growth, rather than ushering in a long phase of contraction, as has long been argued by historians of a ‘neo-Malthusian’ persuasion. This revisionist case rests on two propositions. In the first place, the consequences of the demographic slump following the Black Death are seen in a more optimistic light. On the supply side, the demographic crisis reduced population pressure on basic agricultural resources and made it possible to make more efficient use of land and labour; on the demand side, the sharp tightening of labour markets caused a redistribution of income from landlords and employers to the peasantry and urban wage earners, who spent much of their increased disposable income on cheap manufactures and on foodstuffs with higher added value. This claim has a long intellectual pedigree and has gained a broad acceptance among scholars. The second proposition is that the rise in the late middle ages of more centralised states, and the consolidation of parcellised sovereignty that it entailed, reduced the institutional costs of trade in commodities and information both by lowering feudal and urban tariffs, and by aiding the development of more efficient and integrated trading networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the later middle ages and the early modern period Florentine citizens managed money, pen and ink for princes and sovereigns in all of Europe. But this clear fame in finance has not stopped modern historians from passing severe judgment on these same men when it came to the fiscal administration of their own state. The most recent historiography has emphasised the inability of the Florentines to separate reasons of state from personal, family and factional interests. Its hypotheses are rooted in an alleged Florentine abandonment during the fifteenth century of the mainstream of simplification and rationalisation of the fiscal system. After the return of Cosimo il Vecchio to Florence in 1434, it is asserted, major fiscal confusion and less rigour in the administration of state finances were consonant with the rising political fortunes of the Medici family. This recent understanding was arrived at in the study of Florentine domestic politics, through reconstructing the vital ties between the public debt, short-term credit, and the political connections of the governing families of Florence. The interpretation has also been extended ‘outward’, as it were, to involve the history of the Tuscan regional state. Medicean hegemony, it is said, interrupted relevant processes that had started during the decisive period of territorial expansion, namely the administrative integration of the Florentine dominion, the erosion of the power of the local intermediaries between the central fisc and its taxpayers, and the reinforcement of direct taxes on subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Florentine statutes were based on Roman law and Florence regarded itself proudly as heir to Rome. As Leonardo Bruni boasted in his Laudatio of Florence, ‘your founder is the Roman people – the lord and conqueror of the entire world’ and since their ‘imperium was equal to the entire world … therefore to you also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominium over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy’. Dominion (dominium, dominio) was the word used by the Florentines to describe their growing state at this time; and, although Bruni tells us that no one, after seeing the city, failed to believe that Florence was capable of acquiring ‘the dominion and imperium of the whole world’, he was careful not to lay claim to imperium by hereditary right. For Florence was still legally subject to the German emperor, and to have described its state as an empire would have been tantamount to laesa maiestas. Since Bruni was also laying claim to Florence's republican inheritance from Rome, he was equally careful to stress that the city was founded ‘when the imperium of the Roman people was at its peak’ – that was before the Caesars and their successors had deprived the Romans of their liberty, hence Florence's own inherited love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was in 1986 that Gian Maria Varanini invited historians, in their study of the Italian territorial states, to look beyond the phase of ‘accomplished stability’ to a ‘prehistory’ in which the characteristic practices of these states took shape. Convinced that the modes of governing of the Italian states were not new with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Varanini argued that these political structures originated in the communal period: in the experience of establishing control over the countryside and in the development of a hierarchy among the north Italian cities. Seen from the perspective of this communal prehistory, the formation by Florence of a territorial dominion was not an inevitable process, but a process open to different possible paths for development. If, therefore, a linear understanding of political development is abandoned, I should prefer to speak of the ‘material constitution’ of the territorial state. This seems a term well suited to describing the early hierarchy of Tuscan cities and the asymmetries among them that historically preceded the creation of a Florentine dominion. To anticipate this chapter's conclusion, the Florentine process of expansion took place slowly, and in continual interaction with the territorial expansion of rival states. The ordering of the territory did not follow a unitary scheme, nor was there a progressive refinement of public functions; what took shape, rather, was a system characterised from the beginning by a low degree of integration among its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]