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Justice, Authority and the Creation of the Ancien Rgime in Italy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Judith A. Hook
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Extract

IN the fifteenth and particularly in the sixteenth century one obvious casualty of historical development was the corporate state, embodied in the city states and communes of medieval Italy. Whether conquered by powerful foreign powers, or succumbing to the attractions of a locally-based signore, with the notable, and frequently-lauded, exception of Venice, whose proudest boast remained that her affairs were governed with laws, all the Italian communes had collapsed by the beginning of the seventeenth century and the norm of political organisation had become the highly centralised, absolutist monarchy, typified by the Church State, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Duchy of Savoy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 34 , December 1984 , pp. 71 - 89
Copyright
Copyright Royal Historical Society 1984

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References

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3 Some exceptions to this generalisation must be made, particularly among Italian La giustizia e la politica agli albori dell'et moderna in Potere e societ negli stati regionali italiani del '500 e '600, ed. Guarini, E. F. (Bologna, 1978), 4974Google Scholar; Marrara, D., Studi Giuridici sulla Toscana Medicea (Milan, 1965)Google Scholar; and my Siena and the Renaissance State, Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria, lxxxvi (1981), 107122Google Scholar. There are interesting suggestions in Gundersheimer, W. L., Ferrara; the Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, 1973)Google Scholar, and in Cochrane, E., Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973)Google Scholar. For the current revival of interest in legal history among early modern English historians see the review article by Ives, E. W., English Law and English Society, History, lxvi. No. 216 (1981), 5060CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 ASS, Bala n. 608, f. 3.

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26 ASS, Statuti Senesi n. 49, f. 145V.

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31 ASS, Bala n. 433, ff. 2OV21. For other efforts on the part of the Bala see Bala n. 100, ff. IIV, 26, 34, 50; Bala n. 433, ff. 1819, 20V21, 27, 50V.

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39 E. Dupr Theseider, II mondo cittadino nelle pagine di S. Caterina in idem, Mondo Cittadino e Movimenti Ereticali nel Medio Evo (Bologna, 1978), 2023.

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47 Ibid., f. 30.

48 Ibid., ff. 4, 5, 88v, 2930V, 44, 65V, 139.

49 Ibid., f. 149.

50 For a typical case see ASS, Concistoro 2206, c. 169.

51 See, for example, the accusations made against the Executor of Justice in Florence in 1367, printed in Brucker, G., The Society of Renaissance Florence: a Documentary Study (1971), 234Google Scholar and in ibid., 86, the oath of a Guelph parte of c. 1350. For the Romagna see the perceptive comments by Larner, J. in Order and Disorder in Romagna 14501500 in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities 12001500, ed. Martines, L. (1972), 507Google Scholar. A typically silly suggestion by the Neapolitan baronage was to invite the Turks into Italy to arbitrate between themselves and the King. Pontieri, 105.

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56 ASS, Bala n. 522, c. 23. For Ferrante of Naples opinion that peace within Rome necessitated subjecting the Orsini and the Colonna to the law see Pontieri, 223.

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58 ASS, Bala n.4 10, ff. 13, 24V.

59 Larner, 62.

60 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo avanti il Principato, xxvi, c. 332.

61 ASS, Bala n. 34, f. 71; n.525, c.80, 85; n.608, f.64; Consiglio Generate n.245, ff. 7V8, 228V; Statuti di Siena n. 49, ff. 188V89.

62 ASS, Consiglio Generale n. 245, f. 229; Statuto di Siena n. 49, f. 144.

63 ASS, Consiglio Generale n. 245, ff. 22931v.

64 Ibid., ff. 231V32.

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78 N. Machiavelli, The History of Florence, Book III, chap. 12.

79 For Machiavelli's typically perceptive explanation of that lawlessnessthat its rulers did not observe their own lawssee The Discourses, III, chap. 29.

80 N. Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 7.

81 F. Guicciardini, The History of Florence, chap. 24; The History of Italy, Book VI.

82 N. Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 19. See also The Discourses, III, chap. 1.

83 A similar lesson had been preached by Vettori to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. See Betti, Gian Luigi, Pandolfo Petrucci Exemplum Politico nel Parere Io di Francesco Vettori, Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria, lxxxvii (1980), 228Google Scholar.

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