Galileo's Italy
Early modern Italy (16th to 18th century)
Culture and society
Cities and courts spawned the high culture of late Renaissance Italy. Ranging from Pietro Aretino’s merciless lampoons of the scandalous lives of the princes of the church in Renaissance Rome to the mysticism and Christocentric piety embraced by the intellectual circle surrounding the Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés in Naples, Italian culture in the 16th century defined itself for or against the church. Machiavelli, in a famous chapter of Discorsi sopra la prima deca di tito Livio (1513–19; “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy”), argued that the church was the cause of Italian ills because it had lost its religious moorings and had kept the Italians politically divided. A rigid Counter-Reformation orthodoxy, however, condemned some of Italy’s most brilliant intellectuals—philosophers and scientists such as Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600, Tommaso Campanella, who was imprisoned in 1599 for 27 years, and Galileo Galilei, who was forced to recant his Copernican beliefs and was placed under permanent house arrest in 1633.
At the same time, however, Italy was at the forefront of a movement that fostered scientific exchange by establishing scientific academies—the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (founded in 1603), the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657), and the Neapolitan Accademia degli Investiganti (1665). In fields such as drama (both tragedy and comedy), music (both religious and secular), art history, rhetoric, and political theory, Italians of the late Renaissance played formative roles—the poets Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, the composers Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Claudio Monteverdi, the artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, and the political theorist and statesman Giovanni Botero, to name just a few. These examples demonstrate the continuity of Italy’s cultural achievement in the period that followed the High Renaissance.
Society and economy
The expanding demographic and economic base of Italy provided the wherewithal for the political and cultural programs of the 16th century. From the mid-15th-century demographic low point after the 1347–48 plague, Italy, along with the rest of western Europe, recovered dramatically. Between 1400 and 1600 the Italian population nearly doubled, increasing from about 7 million to about 13 million, and prices rose sharply, with cereal prices tripling and quadrupling. Increased demand, the increased supply of money from the silver of the New World, and profligate military expenditures fueled high inflation. Italy’s most distinctive feature was its highly urbanized life. In 1550, 30 cities—more than in any other region in the West—had populations of more than 10,000.
Rural areas nevertheless still accounted for almost 88 percent of the total population, and, given the relative parity in birth and death rates, cities grew primarily as a result of rural emigration. Wheat and wool were the chief agricultural products, and the spread of capitalist agriculture in the 16th century was an important ingredient in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Textile production of both woolens and silks continued to be the major industry in the cities, but the precocious economic development of Italy in manufacturing, trade, and finance came to a crashing halt during the dislocations of the 17th century.
The economic recovery of the second half of the 16th century challenged the traditional hierarchical ordering of society. Nobility and clergy, the two most identifiable groups, did not lose their status but slowly changed character. With the demise of old families and the rise of a new nobility based on wealth and public service, social mobility in the cities put the old aristocracy on the defensive until it was able to forge new alliances with the ruling princes and the bourgeois bankers and merchants. At the same time, demographic growth and a yawning gap between wages and prices threatened to create an even larger disparity between rich and poor. In good times, the lower classes could provide a new labour market, fueling industrial production; in economically bad times, however, sickness, unemployment, and the rising price of bread could drive them down into the vortex of poverty and even push them to the point of rebellion.
The 17th-century crisis
The economic boom of the late 16th century began to stall throughout Europe. The first signs of hardship appeared in Italy after 1585, and famine persisted through the 1590s. New waves of plague struck northern Italy and Tuscany in 1630–31 and southern Italy, Lazio, and Genoa in 1656–57, with population losses between one-fourth and one-fifth, respectively. The large cities of Milan, Naples, and Genoa lost as much as half of their population. In addition, war in northern Europe after 1618 and in the Middle East between the Ottomans and the Iranians from 1623–39 disrupted Italy’s important export markets; war between Spanish, German, French, and Piedmontese forces moved to Italy between 1628 and 1659; and social conflicts within the Spanish states contributed to the decline of Italy relative to northwestern Europe.
Both agricultural production and urban industries entered into crisis in the decade 1611–20, reaching their low point about 1650. In the south, extensive wheat monoculture exhausted the soil and led to deforestation and soil erosion. Further, noble owners drained off profits for expenditures on urban luxuries, and indebtedness placed commercial grain farmers at greater risk as grain prices fell in the 17th century. In the north, intensive agriculture supported the numerous large cities, but overexpansion onto unproductive land, soil depletion, and the loss of credit pushed the region to the limits of what the population could support. In the cities, wool manufacturing fell by 50 percent in the 1620s and all but disappeared thereafter, although silk production held its own. Commercial and banking activities, once the fastest-growing industries, now constricted, and foreign imports braked further development at home. Italy’s early industrial lead lost to increased competition from northwestern Europe as new products at lower prices replaced the traditional ones in the Italian markets. The Italian guilds’ opposition to technological and organizational change, higher taxes, and higher labour costs prevented the adaptability required to surmount the short-term crisis, which instead turned into a long-term structural realignment. Only in Lombardy was there a successful shift to the putting-out system, which transfered urban industries to the countryside.
The economic involution reinforced the social hierarchy, favoured investment in landed property and rents over commerce and industry, and reinvigorated noble pretensions. With capital shifted from the manufacturing and service sectors to agricultural production of cash crops such as olive oil, wine, and raw silk, the number of skilled urban craftsmen and merchants decreased while that of illiterate peasants increased, and landed-noble power intensified. The church reasserted itself in every aspect of social life, from land ownership to ecclesiastical organization, from the defense of orthodoxy and the culture of the Council of Trent to the education of the ruling class. As the economic crisis deepened, middling ranks lost out, and social stratification between rich and poor rigidified.
In the political sphere, Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and subsequent wars with other European powers—financed in part by taxes on its Italian possessions—drained Italy. As Spain declined, it dragged its Italian realms down with it. Revolts broke out in Palermo and Naples in 1647. In Naples a revolt of July 7 was mistakenly identified as a plebeian rebellion bearing the name of a young fishmonger, Masaniello, although he was murdered within 10 days and had actually been a tool of bourgeois elements seeking greater political power in the city. The uprising spread to the countryside, established a republic that sought French protection, and assumed the character of an open rebellion against Spain and native feudal lords. Internal dissension and the arrival of the Spanish fleet brought an end to the revolt by April 1648. The social and economic crisis deepened in Naples after the failure of the revolt and a recurrence of the plague in 1656. Lost was any hope of an alliance between the middle classes and the urban proletariat or rural masses against the landed aristocracy. Paradoxically, renewed Spanish reliance on the nobility of the robe fostered the very class that was to lead the cultural renewal that made Naples one of the intellectual centres of 18th-century Italy.
Culture and society
Cities and courts spawned the high culture of late Renaissance Italy. Ranging from Pietro Aretino’s merciless lampoons of the scandalous lives of the princes of the church in Renaissance Rome to the mysticism and Christocentric piety embraced by the intellectual circle surrounding the Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés in Naples, Italian culture in the 16th century defined itself for or against the church. Machiavelli, in a famous chapter of Discorsi sopra la prima deca di tito Livio (1513–19; “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy”), argued that the church was the cause of Italian ills because it had lost its religious moorings and had kept the Italians politically divided. A rigid Counter-Reformation orthodoxy, however, condemned some of Italy’s most brilliant intellectuals—philosophers and scientists such as Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600, Tommaso Campanella, who was imprisoned in 1599 for 27 years, and Galileo Galilei, who was forced to recant his Copernican beliefs and was placed under permanent house arrest in 1633.
At the same time, however, Italy was at the forefront of a movement that fostered scientific exchange by establishing scientific academies—the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (founded in 1603), the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657), and the Neapolitan Accademia degli Investiganti (1665). In fields such as drama (both tragedy and comedy), music (both religious and secular), art history, rhetoric, and political theory, Italians of the late Renaissance played formative roles—the poets Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, the composers Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Claudio Monteverdi, the artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, and the political theorist and statesman Giovanni Botero, to name just a few. These examples demonstrate the continuity of Italy’s cultural achievement in the period that followed the High Renaissance.
Society and economy
The expanding demographic and economic base of Italy provided the wherewithal for the political and cultural programs of the 16th century. From the mid-15th-century demographic low point after the 1347–48 plague, Italy, along with the rest of western Europe, recovered dramatically. Between 1400 and 1600 the Italian population nearly doubled, increasing from about 7 million to about 13 million, and prices rose sharply, with cereal prices tripling and quadrupling. Increased demand, the increased supply of money from the silver of the New World, and profligate military expenditures fueled high inflation. Italy’s most distinctive feature was its highly urbanized life. In 1550, 30 cities—more than in any other region in the West—had populations of more than 10,000.
Rural areas nevertheless still accounted for almost 88 percent of the total population, and, given the relative parity in birth and death rates, cities grew primarily as a result of rural emigration. Wheat and wool were the chief agricultural products, and the spread of capitalist agriculture in the 16th century was an important ingredient in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Textile production of both woolens and silks continued to be the major industry in the cities, but the precocious economic development of Italy in manufacturing, trade, and finance came to a crashing halt during the dislocations of the 17th century.
The economic recovery of the second half of the 16th century challenged the traditional hierarchical ordering of society. Nobility and clergy, the two most identifiable groups, did not lose their status but slowly changed character. With the demise of old families and the rise of a new nobility based on wealth and public service, social mobility in the cities put the old aristocracy on the defensive until it was able to forge new alliances with the ruling princes and the bourgeois bankers and merchants. At the same time, demographic growth and a yawning gap between wages and prices threatened to create an even larger disparity between rich and poor. In good times, the lower classes could provide a new labour market, fueling industrial production; in economically bad times, however, sickness, unemployment, and the rising price of bread could drive them down into the vortex of poverty and even push them to the point of rebellion.
The 17th-century crisis
The economic boom of the late 16th century began to stall throughout Europe. The first signs of hardship appeared in Italy after 1585, and famine persisted through the 1590s. New waves of plague struck northern Italy and Tuscany in 1630–31 and southern Italy, Lazio, and Genoa in 1656–57, with population losses between one-fourth and one-fifth, respectively. The large cities of Milan, Naples, and Genoa lost as much as half of their population. In addition, war in northern Europe after 1618 and in the Middle East between the Ottomans and the Iranians from 1623–39 disrupted Italy’s important export markets; war between Spanish, German, French, and Piedmontese forces moved to Italy between 1628 and 1659; and social conflicts within the Spanish states contributed to the decline of Italy relative to northwestern Europe.
Both agricultural production and urban industries entered into crisis in the decade 1611–20, reaching their low point about 1650. In the south, extensive wheat monoculture exhausted the soil and led to deforestation and soil erosion. Further, noble owners drained off profits for expenditures on urban luxuries, and indebtedness placed commercial grain farmers at greater risk as grain prices fell in the 17th century. In the north, intensive agriculture supported the numerous large cities, but overexpansion onto unproductive land, soil depletion, and the loss of credit pushed the region to the limits of what the population could support. In the cities, wool manufacturing fell by 50 percent in the 1620s and all but disappeared thereafter, although silk production held its own. Commercial and banking activities, once the fastest-growing industries, now constricted, and foreign imports braked further development at home. Italy’s early industrial lead lost to increased competition from northwestern Europe as new products at lower prices replaced the traditional ones in the Italian markets. The Italian guilds’ opposition to technological and organizational change, higher taxes, and higher labour costs prevented the adaptability required to surmount the short-term crisis, which instead turned into a long-term structural realignment. Only in Lombardy was there a successful shift to the putting-out system, which transfered urban industries to the countryside.
The economic involution reinforced the social hierarchy, favoured investment in landed property and rents over commerce and industry, and reinvigorated noble pretensions. With capital shifted from the manufacturing and service sectors to agricultural production of cash crops such as olive oil, wine, and raw silk, the number of skilled urban craftsmen and merchants decreased while that of illiterate peasants increased, and landed-noble power intensified. The church reasserted itself in every aspect of social life, from land ownership to ecclesiastical organization, from the defense of orthodoxy and the culture of the Council of Trent to the education of the ruling class. As the economic crisis deepened, middling ranks lost out, and social stratification between rich and poor rigidified.
In the political sphere, Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and subsequent wars with other European powers—financed in part by taxes on its Italian possessions—drained Italy. As Spain declined, it dragged its Italian realms down with it. Revolts broke out in Palermo and Naples in 1647. In Naples a revolt of July 7 was mistakenly identified as a plebeian rebellion bearing the name of a young fishmonger, Masaniello, although he was murdered within 10 days and had actually been a tool of bourgeois elements seeking greater political power in the city. The uprising spread to the countryside, established a republic that sought French protection, and assumed the character of an open rebellion against Spain and native feudal lords. Internal dissension and the arrival of the Spanish fleet brought an end to the revolt by April 1648. The social and economic crisis deepened in Naples after the failure of the revolt and a recurrence of the plague in 1656. Lost was any hope of an alliance between the middle classes and the urban proletariat or rural masses against the landed aristocracy. Paradoxically, renewed Spanish reliance on the nobility of the robe fostered the very class that was to lead the cultural renewal that made Naples one of the intellectual centres of 18th-century Italy.