Anandadeep Roy, Roll No: 25, PG II
“1,000 Florentine horsemen do me less damage than Salutati’s letters and speeches.” –
Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan
The wars between Milan and Florence at the end of the 14th century, bleeding into the 15th, were not fought on battlegrounds alone. The epigraph, which demonstrates the power of the discursive apparatus employed by Florence in this war, is a testament to the fact that this was as much a war of propaganda as a war of arms. It is important to recognize this war as a war of information because the artefacts produced from it contributed significantly to the development of the discourse of liberty and its importance in subsequent political thought. Indeed it is from this war and the rhetorical creations it produced that ‘tyranny’ and ‘republicanism’ came to be given the values that we know today. Of course I do not propose that it was just this span of a decade that contributed to the amalgamation of these political ideologies with actual moral values, but its discursive products, as Hans Baron shows in his work, did play a significant role in this trajectory.
To quote Dr. House: “Nobody is innocent, everybody lies.” This is particularly pertinent in the domain of Renaissance politics, especially in the case of the war between Florence and Milan. Both of the city states were aggressively expansionist throughout the 14th century, this fact holds true irrespective of what either side claims. Florence, which had to support a larger number of citizens than its sisters like Pisa or Siena, started on an aggressive foreign policy from the 1380s after concluding its conflict with the Papacy. The demographic problem is one of the probable answers to the coercive tactics that Florence used to gain more territory.
Milan, on the other hand, came under the leadership of the extremely ambitious Giangalleazo Visconti. According to Barbara Tuchmann, Gian Galleazo gained the signora of Milan after ruthlessly overthrowing his uncle and then eventually having him poisoned in prison, in 1385. His goal, he declared, was to “wear the crown of Italy.” He used his newly acquired Duchy wisely and started on an aggressive campaign to fulfill his dream. This lead to the formation of an anti-Visconti league called the League of Bolgna comprising of Padua, Ferrara, Mantua and Bologna. These city states along with others fell one by one before the Visconti assault. In the 1390s, the Duke conquered Vicenza, Verona and Padua, followed by Pisa and Siena in 1399 and Assisi and Perugia in 1400. In short, due to the Duke’s territorial ambitions, Florence found herself surrounded by 1400; the entire Po valley under the Duke’s control. All through the 1390s, Gian Galleazzo kept up a constant warfront with the Florentines, exhausting their resources as he went from one victory to the next. The threat from Milan was ominous and constant and the person who had to deal with them was esteemed Florentine statesman, scholar and Humanist, Collucio Salutati.
The other face of this war was the one taking place between the Milanese and the Florentine humanists. Rather than the oppressive tyrant that Florentine propaganda late made him to be Giangalleazzo Visconti was actually a very competent ruler, investing in infrastructure and development, For example in 1400 he employed huge bodies of clerks and established a bureaucracy to administer his fledgling empire. Large parts of this bureaucracy and indeed the Duke’s own court was populated by scholars from all the conquered cities. They were not fully fledged Humanists yet, but were well on their way to becoming them as many of them had been trained under the humanist program preached so effectively by Petrarch. They believed in the redeeming value of Classical learning and sought to apply them in their lives, especially in their political lives and the foremost and most useful arts among these was the art of rhetoric.
It is effective use of the art of rhetoric that characterizes the propaganda war between the Milanese Humanists in the court of the Duke and the Florentine Humanists lead by the chancellor, Salutati.
Hans baron, put forth the thesis on civic humanism based on the literary productions that this crisis elicited from the Florentines. To quote: “The places which held cultural predominance in the first decades of the Quattrocento were not as yet the seats of the tyrants, later to become famous, but rather the remaining city-state republics led by Florence. Yet at that very moment, with comparative suddenness, a change in Humanism as well as in the arts took place which ever since has been considered to have given birth to the mature pattern of the Renaissance. The medieval elements which had survived through the Trecento were then either destroyed or transformed. Antiquity became the model, and the measure of life, in a first era of classicism.”
Baron essentially took the humanism of the Florentines at face value and assigned them a kind of moral character associated with the culture and ‘liberty’ that they claimed to defend. It is this that he claims was the birthplace of the “mature renaissance.” By his specific argument Baron divorced other trends of humanistic thought from their political formations and married it specifically to Republicanism. Henceforth it was difficult to talk about Civic Humanism as a separate entity from the republican ideas that Florence claimed to defend. Later scholars have pointed out problems with this thesis, most notably the Cambridge school of Skinner and Pocock who have shown that the historical roots of Civic Humanism run deeper than just the twelve years of crisis that, Baron claims, gave birth to it. Skinner in particular has shown the ideological links behind civic humanism emerges from the legal defenses mounted by the City republics of Medieval Italy and cites legal scholars like Bartolus as evidence. These legal defenses were also used by Salutati in his own text, lending credence to Skinner’s idea that civic humanism was not just a result of the Milan crisis but a result of political thought current during the time.
There are a large number of discourses feeding into the defense mounted by Florence. What I propose in this essay is to look at the institution of Civic Humanism more as a pure rhetorical construction rather than an ideologically driven agenda. Essentially I will attempt to expose Florentine Civic Humanism as yet an equivalent hegemony to that of Milanese tyranny, each as bad as the other, only redeemed by the art of better rhetoric and most importantly an iron clad set of legal principles and ideologies that helped it to win the propaganda war at the end. This theory is in tune with Kristeller’s idea that the early Renaissance Humanists were like Bruni were “professional rhetoricians.” I hope to show the truth behind Kristeller’s ideas in more detail by examining one of the most important letters written by Salutati in his long career of letter writing, the Invective Against Antonio Loschi.
Antonio Loschi was a humanist trained in the tradition of Petrarch, employed as his family was traditionally employed by the archbishop of Milan. In 1386, during a stay in Florence, he came into contact with Collucio Salutati. He formed a strong bond with Salutati and was on good terms with him till the publication of the Invectiva in Florentinos. This text was clearly written by Loschi as a bid to come into Gian Galleazzo’s good graces who was in a war with Florence at that time. It formed a major part of the propaganda attack on Florentine pretensions to liberty by pointing out certain hypocrisies in her policies. What should not be forgotten is that this is not a document of principles or ideals. It had some very specific purposes. Primarily, it sought to undermine Florentine republican ideologies and destabilize the Florentine alliances of Bologna, Ferrara, Mantua and the Kingdom of France which was the principal obstruction against Gian Galleazo’s domination of the Po valley. Secondarily the aim of piece was to endear him to Gian Galleazo who was trying to counter the Florentine propaganda attack himself which came in the form of Salutati’s public letters like the letter to the Sienese urging them to fight against Gian Galleazo and painting him as an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant. Needless to say Loschi’s stratagem worked and he found himself the Duke’s chancellor in 1398 after the fall of his boss Capelli due to accusations of betrayal. Having become the Chancellor, Loschi reissued his already published Invectiva to launch an even stronger attack against the Florentines. This publication alienated him from the central circle of Huamnists in Florence who saw it as their duty to counter this publication and in 1404, Salutati saw it fit to reply by publishing the Invectiva in Antonium Luschum.
The content of Loschi’s text, which is now lost, can be deduced from contemporary sources including Salutati’s own reply. Loschi used the weapon of dialectics to launch a scathing attack on Florentine principles of libertas using which Salutati and other humanists were calling into question the legitimacy of the Duke. Loschi claimed that Florence herself had hegemonic ambitions and that, by opposing Gian Galleazzo, she was preventing a united Italy which would be good for Italian people. He pointed out that Florentine libertas was a sham and that Florence herself occupied or wanted to occupy other cities and take away their liberty, the same as Gian Galleazzo, the only difference being that the Florentines were corrupt schemers and Gian Galleazzo had the legitimacy of being a prince. He attacked Florence on four important grounds. First, that she was as hegemonic as the Duchy of Milan, only more covert and thus more suspicious and pernicious. Second, that by forming an alliance with the Kingdom of France Florence had forfeited the right to claim that they were defending the Italian people, because they were effectively inviting a foreign tyranny into Italian matters. Third, that their claim to be defenders of republicanism was forfeit because of their alliance with cities with tyrannical rulers like Mantua and Ferrara. The fourth ground was more a move in the extended game between Florence and Milan concerning who could claim earlier Roman descent. Here Loschi challenged Florence’s claim of being founded by the Roman’s during the time of Julius Caesar by which she claimed a mythic Republican tradition. In short, Loschi’s piece was a specific local political attack, colored by contemporary circumstances, in the guise of an extended ideological attack on republicanism.
Loschi’s language was hyperbolic and polemical, designed to be a fiery political piece against the “corrupt” Florentines. It was clearly created for public consumption and to sway opinion in the favor of the Duke in the face of Salutati’s stream of public letters which continued to paint Gian Galleazo as an illegitimate oppressor. The text questioned Florence’s right to do so by pointing out that she was guilty of the same if not worse things. Couched in rhetorical language, it would seem to the credulous reader that Florence was the most criminal of all the states opposing Loshi’s master in his honorable task of reuniting all Italy. To quote what Salutati himself quoted in his epistle: “Someday, wretched citizens who have destroyed your country and disrupted peace in all Italy, you will finally suffer the just punishment for your crimes and pay the penalties you deserve. Someday your followers will be so horrified at your tremendous corruption as to fear their own ruin on account of their misdeeds. Your fall, therefore, will be not only a legitimate vindication but also a useful example. Someday your scheming, in which your entire force lies, will finally be discovered and revealed to all, thereby showing your opponents’ wisdom and, by contrast, your depravity and utter wickedness.”
Salutati’s retort, published in 1404, was an example of rhetorical mastery. He took each accusation that Loschi made and broke it down to its barest essentials and rendered it as absurd pieces of empty rhetoric. His own language was also hyperbolic but due to the mastery of his art no one could actually claim that what Salutati was writing was inaccurate. His counter points were iron clad and rather than grasp at the meaning behind the words, Salutati attacked the words themselves and since the words of Loschi were mostly rhetorical decorations, they fall apart under Salutati’s logical and methodical attack. For example, to Loschi’s attack that Florentines are wretched citizens, Salutati replies: “You call the Florentines “wretched citizens who have destroyed your country and disrupted peace in all Italy.” “Wretched citizens,” you say. If your aim is to insult the Florentines, what you say is an outright lie. The term “wretched citizens” may, in fact, apply to those who squander their possessions and lead a wicked life, committing immoral acts and all sorts of sins; truthfully speaking, however, the Florentines who do not deserve to be dubbed wretched are far more numerous. You must confess that, by consensus, many of them should and must be acknowledged as good citizens, not wretched ones. At any rate, it does not behoove our enemy to complain about this; we [not you] are the ones who should deplore wicked citizens, for it is in our interest to have good and useful citizens who help our republic.”
Before examining the most important part of Salutati’s argument, that of the legal debate between tyranny and republicanism, I will draw attention to the secondary issue that Salutati devotes a significant portion of his epistle to – that of the origin of Florence. This debate, though it may appear extraneous and superfluous to the more serious and pertinent issue of republicanism is in fact rhetorically important as it brings in a discourse that supports Florence’s claim as a defender of republicanism – this is the discourse of Florentine exceptionalism.
Loschi’s attack on the origins of Florence was very troubling even if it appears extraneous to doctrinal arguments. For civic humanism, republicanism was intimately tied to its history with Rome; so much so that an attack on its origins was also an attack on its pretensions to republicanism. As Patrick D. McCorkle says in his essay on Florentine exceptionalism: “Salutati and others like him believed that their respect for liberty derived from the Roman Republic, the apex of human political organization in their eyes.”
To answer Loschi’s attack, Salutati employed a large array of arguments. He went into the archives and discovered that while the myth that Florence was founded in the time of Julius Caesar was indeed a myth, Florence was indeed founded by the Romans, specifically legionnaires during the time of Sallus. He also used other arguments like an etymological analysis coupled with a dubious comparison to attack Loschi. While his arguments may appear suspect to the modern reader, in the 14th century, Salutati’s rhetorical prowess ensured that his points reverberated with Florentine pride.
The point to note here is not the specific argument of Florentine origins but to understand how the discourse of Florentine exceptionalism feeds into the discourse of republicanism which in turn is essentially a discourse to support the hegemonic interests of Florentine control. Giovanni Villani claimed the Florence occupied a unique position in the world, Villani’s model of exceptionalism was reused by writers like Salutati and Bruni who linked it historically with Rome to remodel the discourse into one that supported Republicanism. In fact, the early civic humanist writers took to calling Florence “New Rome” which only strengthened their Republican credentials. In the war with Milan where the Milan Humanists were painting Gian Galleazzo as a new Caesar, attempting to reunite all Italy, the Florentines painted themselves as Republican Rome, defending themselves against the barbarian tyrant, Hannibal. On a larger scale, Florence’s claims of origin from the Romans, which granted her exceptional status as a ‘defender of liberty’ was also an excuse for the furthering of her hegemonic interests as we shall see when we look at Salutati’s arguments against tyranny and his defense of Florence’s own expansionist interest.
This discourse of exceptionalism also contributes to the construction of Florence as a community which is superior because of its ‘liberty.’ It is by this superiority that Florence justifies its own actions. Salutati in fact berates Loschi as an idiot because he would not be able to value liberty as he is not born in a “free” state like Florence. In defending Florentines citizens from Loschi’s attack that the citizens of Florence are “wretched”, Salutati again calls on the aid of liberty. He writes: “This is not the case, but, on the contrary, wherever the serpent that hates justice has not imposed his yoke and spread his venom, the Florentines are allowed to dwell, and people love them for their mercantile activities.”
Two things should be noted in this context. First, rather than alluding to Florentine military and coercive domination of other city states, Salutati very subtly disguises it in the form of “mercantile activities” making it sound much less threatening than it actually was. Also the Florentines become associated as community with mercantile expansionism. The second more interesting point is the claim that Florentines as people are welcomed wherever there is justice, implying that Florence’s enemies, as tyrant are unjust and illegitimate. If Milan was then a just state it would welcome Florentines like Florence’s allies welcome them. Florence’s allies, thus very cleverly become, irrespective of their form of government, just states. Thus, by a clever rhetorical game, endows Florence’s supporting stets with the sanction of Florentine approval by deeming them just. Florence thus defines herself as a community which can provide the basis for legitimacy of government. Since Gian Galleazo does not welcome Florentines, who are republicans and thus on the side of justice, he himself and his government must not be just. The question that Salutati cleverly glosses over is whether these states welcome Florentines because they are just or are they just because they welcome Florentines. Either way Salutati constructs the Florentines as a community intricately linked to a tradition of liberty and Republicanism, through her Roman descent and thus by extension to a form of justice. Even his defense of liberty, rather than defending liberty in the abstract upholds the Florentine version of it: “Have you ever known any form of liberty, either in Italy or abroad, which can be said to be greater and purer than Florentine liberty, or even [to be] its equal?” Calling on their Roman origins he also uses Rome as a yardstick against which he measures Florence as greater: “We shall see, you say, but, in truth, you have already seen, as you do now and will again in the future, the steadfastness and the fortitude of the Florentines, superior even to that of the Romans, in defending their most beloved liberty.” As Mikael Hörnqvist claims in his essay Two Myths of Civic Humanism: “In this imperialist myth, the Florentine republic appropriates in the name of Florentina libertas the universalist claims of the Roman imperial tradition and assumes the role as leader of the free Italian peoples formerly vested in the Church. The Florentines are here not represented merely as one among many Italian peoples with a rightful claim to a Roman descent, but as Rome’s first-born sons and principal heirs. As a consequence, Florentina libertas comes in this simplistic but powerful vision to constitute a supreme form of freedom, morally superior, more authentic and more refined than all surrounding “liberties.”
The most pertinent section of Salutati’s invective, however, is his defense of Florence’s imperial ambitions in the form of a legal defense of the idea of liberty peace. Essentially Salutati claims that Florence’s domination of the Italian people is correct because it does not actually violate principles of liberty. It does not violate these principle because the cities and states under Florence’s rule and those allied to Florence instead of serving one tyrant (like they would if ruled by GIan Galleazo) are serving the rule of law which supports liberty as “more precious than all the money in the world.” He even taunts Loschi by saying that: “I know that to abide by the law in order to preserve one’s freedom can be hard; it can even look like a kind of slavery, especially to a reckless young man, always eager to fulfill his material desires and yield to passion.” He essentially links the law that states should follow and liberty in one indivisible block. By doing so he also delegitimizes Gian Galleazzo’s rule as it does not follow the law but the Duke’s own whims and fancies. The asssciation of the law and liberty has many precedents the least of which is the Roman one from which Floretines claim descent. To quote Salutati: “[Are you saying] that Florentine subjects, whom our city has established and made or snatched and taken back from the hands of tyrants, have been suffocated by tyranny or despoiled of their ancient dignity? Those who were either born with us in liberty or recalled to the sweetness of liberty from the distress of a wretched servitude? Do they long to throw off a yoke they do not have, or exchange the sweet restraints of liberty (dulce libertatis frenum) — which is to be free from arbitrary power and live according to the law (iure vivere legibusque) to which everyone is subject — for the tyrannical yoke of your lord, as you pretend to believe?” To Counter Loschi’s claim of making alliances with the French which was not a republican regime, Salutati claimed that the French king bestowed “a Royal liberty” on his subject and that the French abhorred “any form of servitude.” Thus rather than an argument for republicanism, Salutati’s argument is rhetorical one for liberty and legitimacy, neither of which, he claims, Milan has.
Even closer to Salutati is the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius which as Nederman claims also has distinct republican sympathy. A second subdiscourse also emerges from this association between Defensor Pacis and Salutati’s defense of the liberty of his Republic – that of peace. Marsilius claims that the State should have temporal power because it can preserve peace and this is also what Salutati claims for the laws of his republic and uses it as an excuse for hegemony. He claims that if other states follow Florentine laws (read: allow Florentine domination) they would know peace as Florence knows peace. He thus uses the possibility of peace as a byproduct of liberty which is the prerogative of the Florentines to spread. The Florentine Republic by virtue of being a defender of peace through the doctrine of liberty, claims legitimacy through law and thus claims hegemonic dominion.
An interesting point to note about Salutati’s discourse of liberty and republicanism is the kind of government Salutati was serving. Salutati was serving a government which was chiefly mercantile in its nature. The government composed of greater representation from the guilds and the production classes had been overthrown and the government that existed during the period that Salutati was writing his letters was very elite and financially powerful. Florentine expansionism was in a lot of ways in their interests and Salutati’s discourse of liberty and republicanism could also have been propaganda for this form of government. Let us not forget that during this time Florence was facing starvation, plagues and famines as a result of the extended wars. Let us also not forget that the Invectiva was published in 1404, when the Visconti threat was all but gone due to the death of Gian Galleazzo in 1402 by the plague. What purpose then did the epistle serve? One theory can be posited that, more than a defense of liberty, the Invectiva was a clever political tool to rally the Florentine people behind the government and prevent an insurrection. It could be, as Najemy argues, a text in the tradition of a particular kind of civic humanism that enabled the elite to remain in power. Najemy also argues that this form of civic humanism won over the other more popular form of republicanism due to the rhetorical support that intellectuals like Bruni and Salutati gave it during its period of concretizing its hegemony. I posit that texts like the Invectiva, rhetorical and inspirational, were more tools for the preservation of the hegemony of the elites than actual defenses of republican principles. To quote Najemy: “Two very different kinds of republicanism confronted each other in this period of transformation, and civic humanism was the intellectual expression and ideological product of the ascendancy and triumph of the newer form of Florentine republicanism. I contend that civic humanism’s real antagonist – the enemy it sought to defeat was less the duke of Milan than the popular, guild republicanism that had periodically surfaced to challenge the hegemony of the elite in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”
On a structural level, critics like Kristeller and Skinner have pointed out the rhetorical nature of civic humanism. They have said that rather than its political manifestation as republican thought (as Baron would have it), it is essential to recognize civic humanism as an extension of growing interest in humanistic thought in Italy in the 14th century and also to recognize that the early humanists like Bruni and Salutati were master rhetoricians who used already existing principles of civic liberty (preached by thinkers like Barotlus and Marsilius and Nicholas of Cusa in the Middle ages) and couched it in rhetoric learnt from Cicero and Sallust. Rather than consider civic humanism to be a new political movement, they considered it to be a culmination of trends of thought current in Italy at that time, including an interest in rhetoric fostered by the tradition of the dictatores. For example, Kristeller places the humanists in the context of their role as rhetoricians serving an immediate political goal which necessitated an effective rhetorical program rather than an ideology (as baron would have us believe): “The humanists were not classical scholars who for personal reasons had a craving for eloquence, but vice versa, they were professional rhetoricians, heirs and successors of the medieval rhetoricians, who developed the belief, then new and modern, that the best way to achieve eloquence was to imitate classical models, and who thus were driven to study the classics and to found classical philology”
This theory has ample evidence in Salutati’s Invectiva , which, rather than offer concrete arguments for all of Loschi’s accusations, resorts to complex rhetorical retorts, which while offering very little concrete argumentative points, leaves Loschi’s points as irrelevant. The most striking of this is ofcourse Salutati’s defense of liberty that I mentioned earlier. Salutati manages to ensconce his idea of liberty in so many layers of rhetoric, including rhetorical questions, assertions, self-reflexive denials and sharp insults, that the very fact of Florentine hegemony goes effectively unanswered but Loschi is left without any concrete arguments himself. Like the well trained, politically conscious rhetorician that he is, Salutati uses the full force of his classical studies of rhetoric to undermine loschi while remaining politically non-committal or intentionally glossing over the many trespasses and injustices of the Florentine Republic itself.
In conclusion, a close reading of Salutati’s Invectiva problematizes the Baron thesis on civic humanism and the formation of the Florentine republican community in the following ways:
- Salutati’s construction of Florence as a defender of liberty was actually a tool to further her own hegemonic interests
- Salutati’s construction of liberty itself was faulty as it failed to answer pertinent questions raised by Loschi about Florence’s support of tyrannical governments other than Milan, which can be answered by referring to the political reality of the Milanese invasion that Florence faced. In short, Florence’s ideologies were defined by the immediate political realities rather than an idealistic belief in liberty and republicanism
- Florentina libertas was considered by Salutati to be the best kind of liberty that all other Italians should follow as it was superior to other forms of liberty due to Florence’s alleged descent from republican Rome. The superiority ensured a position of preference among all her dominion who followed her laws of liberty because of the discourse of Florentine exceptionalism – again furthering her imperial interests.
- Florence claimed legitimacy due to its laws as opposed to the tyranny and illegitimacy of Gian Galleazo where its laws were again not equally applicable to itself and its allies
- Florence as community was defined by this “love of liberty”, however the community defined by Salutati and served by him was elite and mercantile as opposed to the more popular government which was overthrown by the mercantile factions – this definition of community was a result of the replacement of a popular form of republicanism with one far more exclusive and restrictive. Thus Salutati’s claims of liberty and free speech were essentially ways to further the perpetuation of the domination of the existing ruling class rather than a whole community
- Florence’s own expansionist interest which precipitated the need for a formal doctrine of liberty using which she could engineer a propaganda war, was a need of this mercantile class which Salutati defines as the Florentine community
- The Florentine community of liberty and freedom that Salutati suggests was thus also merely a construction designed to further the interests of the mercantile class
- The idea of Florentine liberty, republicanism as Salutati constructs it (and the doctrine of civic humanism by extension) was a rhetorical construction informed by its legal and rhetorical predecessors of the Medieval age, rather than a definite, unifying, idealistic ideology emerging from Classical learning. It was an assemblage of an array of tools for propaganda designed to maintain the power structure of the mercantile ruling class within the city, and its hegemonic interests outside the city by appropriating the discourse of the city as a whole.
Renaissance Political Thought 