Sometimes cruelty was collective and contagious. At Arezzo, in 1502, a riot broke out against an oppressive Florentine commission; hundreds of Florentines in Arezzo were slain in the streets; whole families were wiped out. One victim was stripped naked and hanged, and a lighted torch was thrust between his buttocks; whereupon the jolly crowd nicknamed the corpse il sodomita.76 Tales of violence, cruelty and lust were as popular as superstition. The court of Ferrara, brilliant with poetry and art, was ghastly with princely crimes and royal punishments. The irresponsibility of despots like the Visconti and the Malatestas provided a model and stimulus for the amateur violence of the people.
The morals of war worsened with time. In the early days of the Renaissance almost all battles were modest engagements of mercenaries, who fought without frenzy and knew when to stop; victory was judged won as soon as a few men had fallen; and a live ransomable prisoner was worth more than a dead enemy. As the condottieri became more powerful, and armies larger and more costly, troops were allowed to plunder captured cities in lieu of regular pay; resistance to plunder led to the massacre of the inhabitants, and ferocity grew at the smell of the blood it shed. Even so, the cruelty of the Italians in war was far exceeded by the invading Spanish and French. When the French took Capua in 1501, says Guicciardini, they “committed great slaughter… and women of all ranks and qualities, even such as were consecrated to the service of God… fell a sacrifice to their lust or avarice; many of these poor creatures were afterwards sold at Rome for a small price,”77—apparently to Christians. The enslavement of prisoners of war increased as the wars of the Renaissance progressed.
There were instances of fine loyalty of man to man, of citizen to state; but by and large the development of cunning put a premium on deceit. Generals sold themselves to the highest bidder, and then, in mid-campaign, negotiated with the enemy for a higher price. Governments too changed sides in the middle of a war, and allies became foes by the scratch of a pen. Princes and popes violated safe-conducts given by them;78 governments consented to the secret assassination of their enemies in other states.79 Traitors could be found in any city or camp: instance Bernardino del Corte, who sold Lodovico’s Castello to France; the Swiss and Italians who betrayed Lodovico to the French; Francesco Maria della Rovere, who kept his papal troops from going to the rescue of the pope in 1527; Malatesta Baglioni, who sold out Florence in 1530…. As religious belief declined, the notion of right and wrong was replaced, in many minds, by that of practicality; and as governments seldom enjoyed the authority of legitimation by time, the habit of obedience to law lapsed, and custom had to be supplanted by force. Against the tyranny of governments the only recourse was tyrannicide.
Corruption ran through every department of administration. In Siena the bureau of finance had finally to be put into the hands of a saintly monk, since everybody else had embezzled. Except in Venice, the courts were notoriously venal. One of Sacchetti’s stories tells of a judge who was bribed with the gift of an ox; but the opponent sent the judge a cow and a calf, and won his case.80 Justice was expensive; the poor had to get along without it, and found it cheaper to kill than to litigate. Law itself was making some progress, but chiefly in theory. At Padua and Bologna, Pisa and Perugia, there were famous jurists—Cino da Pistoia, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Baldo degli Ubaldi—whose reinterpretation of Roman law dominated jurisprudence for two centuries. Nautical and commercial law expanded as foreign trade increased. Giovanni da Legnano opened a path for Grotius with a Tractatus de bello (1360), the earliest known work on the laws of war.
But the practice of law was less excellent than its theory. Though police protection of life and property was taking form, especially in Florence, it could not keep abreast of crime. Lawyers abounded. Torture continued to be used in the examination of witnesses as well as of the accused. Punishments were barbarous. In Bologna a convict might be suspended in a cage from one of the leaning towers, and left to fester in the sun;81 in Siena a condemned man was slowly torn to pieces with red-hot pincers while bound to a cart slowly moving through the streets;82 in Milan, under Petrarch’s host Giovanni Visconti, prisoners were subjected to piecemeal mutilation.83 Early in the sixteenth century the custom began of condemning prisoners to pull the heavy oars of galleys; so the ships of Julius II were manned by galley slaves chained by the leg.84
Against these barbarities we may place the high development of organized charity. Every man who made a will left a sum to be distributed among the poor of his parish. Since beggars were numberless, some churches provided the equivalent of modern “soup kitchens”; so the church of Santa Maria in Campo Santo, at Rome, fed thirteen beggars daily, and two thousand on Mondays and Fridays.85 Hospitals, lazarettos, asylums for incurables, for the poor, for orphans, for destitute pilgrims, for reformed prostitutes, were numerous in Renaissance as in medieval Italy. Pistoia and Viterbo were celebrated for the scope of their charities. At Mantua Lodovico Gonzaga established the Ospedale Maggiore for the care of the poor and infirm, and gave it three thousand ducats a year of governmental funds.86 At Venice a society known as the Pellegrini, including in its membership Titian and the two Sansovini, provided mutual aid to its members, dowered poor girls, and practised other charities. Florence in 1500 had seventy-three civic organizations devoted to works of charity. The Confraternità della Misericordia, founded in 1244 but allowed to decay, was restored in 1475; its members were laymen who visited the sick, practised other charities, and earned the love of the people by their courageous attendance upon victims of the plague; their silent black-robed processions are still among the most impressive sights of Florence.87 Venice had a similar Confraternità di San Rocco; Rome had a Sodality of the Dolorosa, now 504 years old; and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici founded in 1519 the Confraternità della Carità to take care of poor persons above the mendicant class, and to provide decent burial for the destitute. The private charity of unrecorded millions lent some mitigation to the struggle of man against man, nature, and death.
VIII. MANNERS AND AMUSEMENTS
Amid violence and dishonesty, and the boisterous life of university students, and the rough humor and kindliness of peasant and proletaire, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led Europe in personal and social hygiene, dress, table manners, cooking, conversation, and recreations; and in all of these except dress Florence claimed to lead Italy. Florence patriotically mourned the filth of other cities, and Italians made Tedesco, German, a synonym for coarseness of language and life.88 The old Roman habit of frequent bathing continued in the educated classes; the well-to-do displayed their finery and “took the waters” at various spas, and drank sulphurous streams as an annual penance to purge digestive sins. Male dress was as ornate as female, except for jewelry: tight sleeves and colored hose, and such wondrous baggy bonnets as Raphael caught on Castiglione. Hose ran up the legs to the loins, splitting men into prancing absurdities; but above the hips a man could be elegant in velvet tunic and silk frills and ruffles of lace; even gloves and shoes sported wisps of lace. At a tournament given by Lorenzo de’ Medici his brother Giuliano wore garments costing 8000 ducats.89
A revolution in table manners came in the fifteenth century with the increasing substitution of a fork for the fingers in carrying food to the mouth. Thomas Coryat, touring Italy about 1600, was struck by the novel custom, “which,” he wrote, “is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels”; and he shared in introducing the idea into England.90 Knives, forks, and spoons were of brass, sometimes of silver—which was lent out to neighbors preparing banquets. Meals were modest except on such outstanding occasions or at state functions; then excess was compulsory. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper, ginger, etc.—were used in abundance to flavor food and stimulate thirst; hence every host offered his guests a variety of wines. The reign of garlic in Italy can be traced back to 1548, but doubtless had begun long before. There was very little drunkenness or gluttony; the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands. When men ate apart from the women of their families they might invite a courtesan or two, as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More careful people would grace the meal with music, poetic improvisations, and educated conversation.