Jacob Burckhardt’s The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860, was one of the great works of historical
scholarship and the creative imagination in the nineteenth century. Here in
brief compass he describes the emergence of an Italian system beset on the west
by France and Spain, and on the east by Turkey. The problem of the balance of
power, and of war and intervention, were coiled round one another in deadly embrace. Together
with a new way of conducting foreign policy, these traits foretold the future development
of the European system—with Burckhardt, like Ferrero in his depiction of the French Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, finding imitation on a gigantic
scale of practices pointing toward the aggregation of state power and deceitful
diplomacy. For the Italian states, the pattern of internal dissension and
foreign intervention ended badly with their loss of freedom—a lesson of great importance
to the founding generation of the United States, wary of being the football of European powers. For
Burckhardt, elements of beauty and grandeur in the refined calculations of
state policy, making the conduct of foreign policy, like the state, a work of
art, ultimately yield “the impression of a bottomless abyss.” (1820 words)
* * *
As the majority of the Italian States were in their internal
constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful
adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign countries also
a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of recent usurpations,
was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in their foreign as in their
internal policy. Not one of them recognized another without reserve; the same
play of chance which had helped to found and consolidate one dynasty might
upset another. Nor was it always a matter of choice with the despot whether to
keep quiet or not. The necessity of movement and aggrandizement is common to
all illegitimate powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a 'foreign policy'
which gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a
recognized system of public law. The purely objective treatment of
international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples, attained
a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty and grandeur of
its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a bottomless abyss.
Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make
up the outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long
accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or gradually so
to reduce its strength that one State after another must fall into her hands.
But on a closer view it is evident that this complaint did not come from the
people, but rather from the courts and official classes, which were commonly
abhorred by their subjects, while the mild government of Venice had secured for
it general confidence, Even Florence, with its restive subject cities, found
itself in a false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial
jealousy and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of
Cambrai actually did strike a serious blow at the State which all Italy ought
to have supported with united strength.
The other States, also, were animated by feelings no less
unfriendly, and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon
which their evil conscience might suggest. Lodovico it Moro, the Aragonese
kings of Naples, and Sixtus IV—to say nothing of the smaller powers—kept Italy
in a constant perilous agitation. It would have been well if the atrocious game
had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the nature of the case that
intervention and help should at last be sought from abroad—in particular from
the French and the Turks.
The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the
side of France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking naïveté its old Guelph preference for
the French. And when Charles VIII actually appeared on the south of the Alps,
all Italy accepted him with an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers
seemed unaccountable. In the imagination
of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a
wise, just, and powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the
difference that he was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian
king of France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long
before all understood how completely Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I had
mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what inferior motives they were
led. The princes, for their part, tried to make use of France in a wholly
different way. When the Franco-English wars came to an end, when Louis XI began
to cast about his diplomatic nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to
embark on his foolish adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at
every point. It became clear that the intervention of France was only a
question of time, even if the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and
that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of what was
to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as 1462. The mortal
terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during the Burgundian war, in which
he was apparently the ally of Charles as well as of Louis, and consequently had
reason to dread an attack from both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.
The plan of an equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by
Lorenzo the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic
spirit, which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and
the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping for the
best. When Louis XI offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of Naples and
Sixtus IV, he replied, 'I cannot set my own advantage above the safety of all
Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the French kings to try
their strength in this country! Should they ever do so, Italy is lost.' For the
other princes, the King of France was alternately a bugbear to themselves and
their enemies, and they threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient
way out of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they
could make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
VIII imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return as a
conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.
Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long
before the expedition of Charles VIII. And when Charles was back again on the
other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of intervention
had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was understood too late
that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had become great European
powers, that they would be no longer satisfied with verbal homage, but would
fight to the death for influence and territory in Italy. They had begun to
resemble the centralized Italian States, and indeed to copy them, only on a
gigantic scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory were for a time
indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of
Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held Papacy
among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could
only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all came to a bad
end.
Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too,
with as little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other
political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had at
various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken, and
Frederick II had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the Oriental
nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived the old
feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western Europe. Italy,
however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as was the terror felt
for the Turks, and the actual danger from them, there was yet scarcely a
government of any consequence which did not conspire against other Italian
States with Mohammed II and his successors. And when they did not do so, they
still had the credit of it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to
poison the cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs
of Alfonso, King of Naples. . . . The two most respectable among the Popes of
the fifteenth century, Nicholas V and Pius II, died in the deepest grief at the
progress of the Turks, the latter indeed amid the preparations for a crusade
which he was hoping to lead in person; their successors embezzled the
contributions sent for this purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded
the indulgences granted in return for them into a private commercial
speculation. . . . When Romagna was suffering from the oppressive government of
Leo X, a deputy from Ravenna said openly to the Legate, Cardinal Giulio Medici:
`Monsignore, the honourable Republic of Venice will not have us, for fear of a
dispute with the Holy See; but if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put
ourselves into his hands.'
It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the
enslavement of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least
secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under the
Turkish rule. By itself, divided as it was, it could hardly have escaped this
fate.
If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of
this period deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and
unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by fear,
passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern fashion, with
its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each possessed he held in
practice as in theory. Here was no attendant nobility to foster in the mind of
the prince the mediaeval sense of honour with all its strange consequences; but
princes and counsellors were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of
the particular case and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose
services were used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no
pride of caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the
class of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows
clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably more
accurate acquaintance with its own country and with that of its neighbours than
was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated the economical and
moral capacities of friend and foe down to the smallest particular. The rulers
were, notwithstanding grave errors, born masters of statistical science. With
such men negotiation was possible; it might be presumed that they would be
convinced and their opinion modified when practical reasons were laid before
them. . . . The art of political persuasion was at this time raised to a
point—especially by the Venetian ambassadors—of which northern nations first
obtained a conception from the Italians, and of which the official addresses
give a most imperfect idea. These are mere pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor,
in spite of an otherwise ceremonious etiquette was there in case of need any
lack of rough and frank speaking in diplomatic intercourse. A man like
Machiavelli appears in his `Legazioni' in an almost pathetic light: Furnished
with scanty instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of
inferior rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his
pleasure in picturesque description.
* * *
Jacob Burckhardt, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: The Modern Library,
1954), based on the 1878 translation by S.G.C. Middlemore and edited by Hajo
Holborn, pp. 71-77.
From Wikipedia comes this photograph of Burckhardt in 1892.
From Wikipedia comes this photograph of Burckhardt in 1892.
