Why was northern Italy the first to experience this spring awakening? There the old Roman world had never been quite destroyed; the towns had kept their ancient structure and memories, and now renewed their Roman law. Classic art survived in Rome, Verona, Mantua, Padua; Agrippa’s Pantheon still functioned as a place of worship, though it was fourteen hundred years old; and in the Forum one could almost hear Cicero and Caesar debating the fate of Catiline. The Latin language was still a living tongue, of which Italian was merely a melodious variant. Pagan deities, myths, and rites lingered in popular memory, or under Christian forms. Italy stood athwart the Mediterranean, commanding that basin of classic civilization and trade. Northern Italy was more urban and industrial than any other region of Europe except Flanders. It had never suffered a full feudalism, but had subjected its nobles to its cities and its merchant class. It was the avenue of trade between the rest of Italy and transalpine Europe, and between Western Europe and the Levant; its commerce and industry made it the richest region in Christendom. Its adventurous traders were everywhere, from the fairs of France to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. Accustomed to dealing with Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Chinese, they lost the edge of their dogmas, and brought into the literate classes of Italy that same indifference to creeds which in nineteenth-century Europe came from widening contacts with alien faiths. Mercantile wisdom, however, conspired with national traditions, temperament, and pride to keep Italy Catholic even while she became pagan. Papal fees trickled to Rome along a thousand rivulets from a score of Christian lands, and the wealth of the Curia overflowed throughout Italy. The Church rewarded Italian loyalty with a generous lenience to the sins of the flesh, and a genial tolerance (before the Council of Trent, 1545) of heretical philosophers who refrained from undermining the piety of the people. So Italy advanced, in wealth and art and thought, a century ahead of the rest of Europe; and it was only in the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance faded in Italy, that it blossomed in France, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain. The Renaissance was not a period in time but a mode of life and thought moving from Italy through Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.
It made its first home in Florence for much the same reasons that gave it birth in northern Italy. Through the organization of her industry, the extension of her commerce, and the operations of her financiers, Fiorenza—the City of Flowers—was in the fourteenth century the richest town in the peninsula, excepting Venice. But while the Venetians in that age gave their energies almost entirely to the pursuit of pleasure and wealth, the Florentines, possibly through the stimulus of a turbulent semidemocracy, developed a keenness of mind and wit, and a skill in every art, that made their city by common consent the cultural capital of Italy. The quarrels of the factions raised the temperature of life and thought, and rival families contended in the patronage of art as well as in the pursuit of power. The final—not the first—stimulus was given when Cosimo de’ Medici offered the resources of his own and other fortunes and palaces to house and entertain the delegates to the Council of Florence (1439). The Greek prelates and scholars who came to that assembly to discuss the reunion of Eastern and Western Christianity had a far better knowledge of Greek literature than any Florentine could then possess; some of them lectured in Florence, and the elite of the city crowded to hear them. When Constantinople fell to the Turks many Greeks left it to make their home in the city where they had found such hospitality fourteen years before. Several of them brought manuscripts of ancient texts; some of them lectured on the Greek language or on Greek poetry and philosophy. So, by the concourse of many streams of influence, the Renaissance took form in Florence, and made it the Athens of Italy.
II. THE MATERIAL BASIS
Florence, in the fifteenth century, was a city-state ruling not only Florence but (with interruptions) Prato, Pistoia, Pisa, Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, and their agricultural hinterland. The peasants were not serfs but partly small proprietors, mostly tenant farmers, who lived in houses of crude cemented stone much as today, and chose their own village officials to govern them in local affairs. Machiavelli did not disdain to chat and play with these hardy knights of the field, the orchard, or the vine. But the magistrates of the cities regulated sales, and, to appease a troublesome proletariat, kept food prices too low for peasant happiness; so the ancient strife of country and city added its somber obbligato to the songs of hate that rose from embattled classes within the city walls.
According to Villani the city of Florence proper had in 1343 a population of some 91,500 souls; we have no equally reliable estimate for later Renaissance years, but we may presume that the population grew as commerce expanded and industry thrived. About a fourth of the city dwellers were industrial workers; the textile lines alone, in the thirteenth century, employed 30,000 men and women in two hundred factories.1 In 1300 Federigo Oricellarii earned his surname by bringing from the East the secret of extracting from lichens a violet pigment (orchella, archil). This technique revolutionized the dye industry, and made some woolen manufacturers into what today would be millionaires. In textiles Florence had already reached by 1300 the capitalistic stage of large investment, central provision of materials and machinery, systematic division of labor, and control of production by the suppliers of capital. In 1407 a woolen garment passed through thirty processes, each performed by a worker specializing in that operation.2
To sell its products Florence encouraged its merchants to maintain trade with all ports of the Mediterranean, and along the Atlantic as far as Bruges. Consuls were stationed in Italy, the Baleares, Flanders, Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, Persia, India, and China to protect and promote Florentine trade. Pisa was conquered as an indispensable outlet of Florentine goods to the sea, and Genoese merchant vessels were hired to carry them. Foreign products competitive with Florentine manufactures were excluded from the markets of Florence through protective tariffs set by a government of merchants and financiers.
To finance this industry and commerce, and much else, the eighty banking houses of Florence—chiefly the Bardi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, Pitti, and Medici—invested the savings of their depositors. They cashed checks (polizze),3 issued letters of credit (lettere di pagamenti),4 exchanged merchandise as well as credit,5 and supplied governments with funds for peace or war. Some Florentine firms lent 1,365,000 florins ($34,125,000?) to Edward III of England,6 and were ruined by his default (1345). Despite such catastrophes Florence became the financial capital of Europe from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century; it was there that rates of exchange were fixed for the currencies of Europe.7 As early as 1300 a system of insurance protected the cargoes of Italy on their voyages—a precaution not adopted in England till 1543.8 Double-entry bookkeeping appears in a Florentine account book of 1382; probably it was already a century old in Florence, Venice, and Genoa.9 In 1345 the Florentine government issued negotiable gold-redeemable bonds bearing the low interest rate of five per cent—a proof of the city’s reputation for commercial prosperity and integrity. The revenue of the government in 1400 was greater than that of England in the heyday of Elizabeth.