The Renaissance in Italy

This class is called Global Politics because we seek to study politics in an international context. Before we go further, we need to do some basic definitional work. What do we actually mean by the word “politics”?

You use the word in daily life — but one way to deepen our understanding is to consider its genealogy: where it came from, and what it originally meant. The word “politics” was first used by the Ancient Greeks. Its stem is polis (πόλις), which referred to the Greek city-states — Athens, Sparta, and the rest — in which the Greeks lived. Politics, therefore, referred to living together in a city-state: marshaling the power needed to build successful relationships between city-states, and asking how human beings can live a good life — eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), literally “good spirit.”

In the modern era we often discuss politics disparagingly. For many Americans, the word is now synonymous with lies, deceit, and ineptitude. From a political-science perspective, that pessimism reflects the shortcomings of our particular political institutions, not the inherent flaws of politics in general. The Greek question — how do we arrange ourselves so we can flourish together? — remains the question.

Politics — at least in its original Greek urban context — was a very intimate matter, exclusionary at its conception. Much of the political history that follows, and much of what we will study this year, is the slow, contested, and often-reversed process of unwinding those exclusions: widening who counts as a citizen, what civil liberties they hold, and how meaningfully they can shape policy. Political scientists call this long process democratization, and we will return to it repeatedly.

Machiavelli was neither Greek nor ancient, but he was in deep conversation with the classical past. Like many Renaissance scholars, he had fallen in love with the Latin classics through the legacy of his predecessor Petrarch, and he was caught up in a passionate revival among Italian scholars who had only recently gained access to ancient Greek texts — thanks to John Argyropoulos, who, fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, brought Aristotle and Plato to Florence. Like his peers, Machiavelli fell under the spell of ancient Greece and Rome. He labored to make his city, Florence, as great as Athens or Rome.

We begin our study of Global Politics in Renaissance Italy because the Italian city-states were among the first places where a “science” of politics was systematically examined. Your summer reading focused on Niccolò Machiavelli — a preeminent theorist of political realism — but he was scarcely the only Italian scholar working on political systems. Machiavelli was writing into a community of thinkers, several of whose names will recur across the unit.

Renaissance Italy was the home of a world of letters — a world we will come to describe as a public sphere — where ideas were discussed, deliberated, and tested in a way that was relatively new on the planet. To understand why this happened, and why Machiavelli’s ideas deserve to be taken seriously, we need to establish two things: first, the conditions that produced this public sphere; and second, how those conditions shaped and validated Machiavelli’s conclusions.

That passage — written from political exile, at a moment when Machiavelli’s public career had collapsed and his pension was insufficient to support his family — is the studia humanitatis in a single paragraph. The studia humanitatis was the Renaissance program of study in classical languages, history, moral philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric: the program that would eventually give English the word humanities. For Machiavelli and his peers, it was less a curriculum than a way of life — an evening in dialogue with Cicero and Livy, treating the ancients as living interlocutors who could be questioned about politics, war, and the nature of the city.

To recap, then: Machiavelli and his circle were steeped in Greek and Roman classical literature, eager to bring ancient political ideas to bear on the public affairs of Italy. But why Italy? Why Florence? Why 1513, and not — say — fifty years earlier?

The sections that follow sketch the contours of an answer. We begin with the peninsula itself.

What follows is a case study in how external forces — geography, trade flows, contact with other cultures — reshape internal political life. The Italian peninsula’s political character cannot be understood apart from the wider Mediterranean world in which it sat at the center.

Italy’s geography was both a blessing and a curse. Italian cities, perched in the mountains, enjoyed formidable natural defenses; the terrain that made them hard to conquer also helped them preserve their independence. But that same terrain was a liability when it came to building large, strong states. Even a conveniently situated city like Florence, perched in the fertile Arno valley, struggled to find enough flat, arable land to grow grain in the volumes a populous society required.

And so Italian cities were forever forced to import staple crops to feed their populations. Here Italy’s meandering coastline came to the rescue: coves, inlets, and natural harbors made it easy to dock ships up and down the peninsula. The question, then, was how Italians would pay for the grain they needed.

The answer was through trade. Italians — as had their neighbors, the Greeks — had long been the merchant sailors of the Mediterranean, making their living by importing and exporting goods between Mediterranean cultures. Geography did not impose this on them, but it strongly encouraged the acquisition of certain traits.

Above all else, Italian merchants had to learn to deal with cultural differences and navigate them with the appreciation needed to profit from them. They came into contact with the Levant, North Africa, and the Atlantic coast of Europe, and contended with a panoply of languages and cultures. Beyond language skills and the cultivation of international contacts, Italians had to become mathematically facile to manage the burdens of commerce: bills of lading, currency conversion, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance (risk management) were all needed to enable commercial exchange. In so doing, Italians had to let go of their cultural narrowness — parochialism — and embrace cultural pluralism: cosmopolitanism.

In addition to the profits earned from the carrying trade, Italians also benefited from some unique historical accidents that tended to concentrate wealth in Italian hands. The development of the Catholic Church in the city of Rome was, all things considered, a historical accident; the center of Christendom might well have remained in Byzantium. Nevertheless, it emerged in Rome — meaning that the wealth earned by the universal church through tithes would always flow into Italian coffers. Equally, there is no particular reason that the Crusades took off with northern Europeans. But they did, and the Venetians and Genoese in particular profited fantastically from ferrying French and English crusaders to the Levant.

The cumulative result was wealth on a scale hard to imagine even today, in the era of billionaires. At moments in their ascendancy, the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Medici families controlled more wealth than the French and English monarchies combined.

Wealth, of course, has its downsides — not least among them rivalry and envy. Italian wealth bred enemies, both at home and abroad. Before we examine those enemies, we need to put in place three concepts that govern how states relate to one another in the absence of any higher power: sovereignty, anarchy, and the security dilemma. We turn to them now.