While every other possession causes work and danger, fear and disappointment, the villa brings a great and honorable advantage; the villa is always true and kind.… In spring the green trees and the song of the birds will make you joyful and hopeful; in autumn a moderate exertion will bring forth a hundredfold; all through the year melancholy will be banished from you. The villa is the spot where good and honest men love to congregate…. Hasten thither, and fly from the pride of the rich, and the dishonor of evil men.68
To which one Giovanni Campano answered for a million million peasants: “Had I not been born a rustic, I should readily have been touched with pleasure” by these descriptions of rural happiness; however, having been a farmer, “what to you are delights are to me a bore.”69
VII. PUBLIC MORALITY
Pandolfini was right in at least one judgment—that commercial and public morality was the least attractive side of Renaissance life. Then, as now, success, not virtue, was the standard by which men were judged; even the righteous Pandolfino prays for wealth rather than for immortal life. Then, as now, men itched for money, and stretched their consciences to grasp it. Kings and princes betrayed their allies, and broke their most solemn pledges, at the call of gold. Artists were no better: many of them took advance payments, failed to finish or begin the work, but kept the money just the same. The papal court itself gave a high example of money lust; hear again the greatest historian of the papacy:
A deep-rooted corruption had taken possession of nearly all the officials of the Curia…. The inordinate number of gratuities and exactions had passed all bounds. Moreover, on all sides deeds were dishonestly manipulated, and even falsified, by the officials. No wonder that there arose from all parts of Christendom the loudest complaints about the corruption and financial extortions of the papal officials. It was even said that in Rome everything had its price.70
The Church still condemned all taking of interest as usury. Preachers inveighed against it; cities—Piacenza, for example—sometimes forbade it under pain of exclusion from the sacraments and from Christian burial. But the lending of money at interest went on, because such loans were indispensable in an expanding commercial and industrial economy. Laws were passed prohibiting a higher rate than twenty per cent, but we hear of cases where thirty per cent was charged. Christians competed with Jews in moneylending, and the town council of Verona complained that the Christians exacted harder terms than the Jews;71 public resentment, however, fell chiefly upon the Jews, and occasionally led to outbreaks of antisemitic violence. The Franciscans met the problem for the most helpless borrowers by establishing, through gifts and legacies, monti di pietà, funds (literally heaps) of charity, from which they made loans to the needy, at first without interest. The first of these was organized at Orvieto in 1463; soon every major city had one. Their growth involved expenditures of administration; and the Fifth Lateran Council (1515) granted the Franciscans the right to charge for each loan an amount necessary to cover the costs of management. Instructed by this experience, some theologians of the sixteenth century allowed a moderate interest on loans.72 Through the competition of the monti di pietà, and probably more through the increasing competence and rivalry of the professional bankers, the rate of interest fell rapidly during the sixteenth century.
Industry became more ruthless with its size, and with the disappearance of a personal relationship between employer and employed. Under feudalism the serf had enjoyed certain rights along with his burdensome dues: in sickness, economic depression, war, and old age his lord was expected to take care of him. In the cities of Italy the guilds performed something of this function for the better class of labor; but in general the “free” laborer was free to starve when he could find no work. When he found it he had to take it on the employer’s terms, and these were hard. Every invention and improvement in production and finance added to profits, rarely to wages. Businessmen were as severe with one another as with their employees; we hear of their many tricks in competition, their deceptive contracts, their innumerable frauds;73 when they co-operated it was to ruin their competitors in another town. However, there were instances of a fine sense of honor among many Italian merchants; and the Italian financiers had the best reputation in Europe for integrity.74
Social morality was a blend of violence and chastity. In the correspondence of the times we find many evidences of a tender and kindly spirit; and the Italians could not compete with the Spaniards in ferocity, or with the French soldiery in wholesale butchery. Yet no nation in Europe could match the endless merciless slander that swept around all prominent persons in Rome; and who but the Italians of the Renaissance could have called Aretino divine? Private violence flourished. Family feuds were refreshed by the breakdown of custom and belief, and the inadequate administration of the laws; men took vengeance into their own hands, and families murdered one another for generations. At Ferrara, as late as 1537, dueling to the death was legal and practised; even boys were allowed to fight each other with knives in these legal lists.75 The strife of parties was bitterer than anywhere else in Europe. Crimes of violence were innumerable. Assassins could be bought almost as cheaply as indulgences. The palaces of Roman nobles swarmed with bravi, thugs ready to kill at a nod from their lords. Everyone had a dagger, and brewers of poison found many customers; at last the people of Rome could hardly believe in the natural death of any man of prominence or wealth. Important personages required that all food or drink served to them should first be tasted by another in their presence. Strange stories were told in Rome of a venenum atterminatum, a poison that took effect only after an interval long enough to cover up the trail of the poisoner. A man had to live on the alert in those days; any evening, if he left the house, he might be ambushed and robbed, and be lucky not to be killed; even in church he was not safe; and on the highways he had to be ready for brigands. The Renaissance mind, living amid these dangers, had to be as sharp as an assassin’s blade.