Gone Medieval - Medieval Italy

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

The huge peninsula of what we today call Italy saw waves of invasions and sweeping changes over the course of the Medieval period, with huge differences between, say, Milan in the north stretching to Sicily in the south. They spoke different languages, had different rulers, and were settled by very different groups of people. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega tries to make sense of Italy’s complex history in the Middle Ages with Ross King, critically-acclaimed author of the new book The Shortest History of Italy, to sort out the Visigoths from the Vandals and the Papal States from Pisa. This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonika, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, we are responding to a listener request. Hannah has asked us for more on medieval Italy, and quite frankly, that is a brilliant idea. However, saying medieval Italy is in a lot of ways a really modern idea. This huge peninsula saw sweeping change over the course of the thousand years of the medieval period, What was true in, say, Milan in the north, wasn't always holding sway down in Sicily. They spoke different languages, had different rulers, and were settled by very different groups of people.

So to help us make sense of this complex and fascinating region, we thought we would invite along Ross King, historian and author of the new book, The Shortest History of Italy, to sort our Visigoths from our vandals and the papal states from Pisa. Well, Ross, I have to thank you so much for being here because I'm going to put you through your paces today. you have written this book, The Shortest History of Italy. I'm going to make you do an even shorter history. I'm about, you know, 500 years and 40 minutes. Do you think you're up for that? Well, let's find out. Let's give it a try. Because a lot happened at that time, but I think we'll try to compress it into digestible chunk of 500 years of history. Okay, so let's start out with just asking a big nebulous question, which is, you know, when would we say the medieval period

began in Italy, because I think in some ways the Italian peninsula is kind of a test case, generally, for when we start the medieval period. Would you agree with that? Well, try to think of what the Middle Ages are. It's a middle period, and so it's a middle period between what and what. And so the two Watts are the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire in the West. And then, of course, what develops in the 1300s, more, especially the 1400s in Italy. So these two great events in Italy, what we call the Renaissance, of the 15th century, and then the great glory period of the Roman Empire, which falls in the West in 476 AD, A.C.E. however we want to describe it. So we have this 900,000-year period,

which we could call the Middle Ages. Historians have more recently, in the last generation or so, started referring to the centuries after 476, not as the Middle Ages, because that's really hurrying things up a little bit too much, but they refer to it as late antiquity. And it's called late antiquity, because it is in many ways, as I'm sure we'll talk about, a continuation, certain institutions and a certain culture of the Roman Empire lingers. And it sometimes flourishes over the course of the 500, 600, 700s, AD, imbricating itself with a new culture, the culture of Christianity, of course. And so it's great to have dates and it's great to have isms and periods and things like that. But of course, we use them for shorthand, but I think you always then have to look at the nuances within them and complicate them a little bit, which is full part of the story and a fun part of the story to tease out the loose threads of what seems to be at finished tapestry and realize how you can pluck out a bit of it and watch it unravel and something else begin to appear.

I'm one of those inveterate pluckers, I'm afraid. I'm very much of the sort of camp and school where I don't really necessarily even like the term fall of the Roman Empire because I think that the successors, the Roman successors, as I am a fan of calling them, I do a pretty good job of keeping things fairly Roman on the peninsula, certainly at least. But I think that we have to talk a little bit about the theory of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, even in a medieval podcast. Because we can definitely say there's a difference between what are sometimes called the successor states or what are sometimes called the barbarian kingdoms that come afterwards, yes. That's right. It's in some ways difficult to talk about the fall of the Roman Empire happening at all. You could argue that the Roman Empire doesn't fall until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks take Constantinople because what we call the Byzantine emperors, who ruled for virtually a thousand years after the last Roman Empire in the West, Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476.

These guys considered themselves in a direct line from Augustus. This was the Roman Empire unfallen, continuing still in Constantinople. But 476 does mark a moment when Romulus Augustulus, who's about 14 or 15 years old, his father has put him on the throne. He's deposed the previous emperor and put his son on the throne. But the son is then deposed by a mercenary captain from north of the Alps, a guy named Odwacher. And Odwacher becomes, well, he calls himself Odwocker Rex. He becomes effectively a king. And he never takes the title of emperor and doesn't seem to have sought it. And he's killed by and then followed by the Austro Gothic king, Theodoric the Great.

And when we talk about the Roman Empire continuing over the course of the following centuries, or it being revived and rehabilitated, Theoderic is really the first one who attempts to do this to bring together the lands ruled by the emperors in previous centuries. And so he brings parts of France and parts of Spain, for example, under his control. And so we have until the death of Theodoric in the 520s, We have a kind of reconstituted empire in the West, even though Theoderic technically was a vassal of the Roman emperor in Constantinople, was really just regarded himself as the king, the Austrogothic king of Italy. But he did as much as he could to try to rehabilitate the grandeur that was Rome. And so we have this what might want to call a barbarian chieftain who becomes a kind of imperial figure in the 500s, AD.

I think one of the things that people fail to understand in the way that we just say, oh, then barbarians attacked and then Rome fell, is that, you know, these barbarians didn't want to destroy Rome, but they wanted to control it. It's no good. You don't want to steal someone's car and then drive it into a wall, right? You know, if you see a grand thing like Rome, the idea that is to control it, not topple it. And I always think Theoderic does a really excellent job of doing that. You know, he hires Roman officials for his court. We have wonderful documents from Theodore. court's showing that he's really attempting to do the same things. And I think that, you know, it's smart. If I took over the Roman Empire, I probably wanted to keep ticking over in the same way. You know, I want those taxes, right? So you mentioned very quickly here that Theoderic is an Ostrogoth. Are these the only kind of barbarians that we see eating into the empire at the time? No, the Austrogoths are what the historian Peter Heather calls a Gothic supergroup, where these Gothic tribes had existed for many centuries and occasionally made incursions across the Danube or across the Rhine

and attacked within the empire. Marcus Aurelia spent the emperor who died in 180 AD, spent the latter part of his reign fighting the Markomanian. People like that were making incursions into the empire. So these smallish tribes had existed for a long time and were regarded by the Romans as barbarians. But ultimately, say, by the 400s, they had banded together and become much larger and more efficient groups. And in some ways, they had banded together because of a threat coming from the East.

In some ways, what we call the Gothic invasions of the Roman Empire are groups of refugees fleeing, a terror that has risen in the East, which are the Huns. And the Huns begin coming probably due to climate change. I mean, there are all sorts of parallels with modern life, but there were obviously adverse climatic events, probably drought in Central Asia, beginning about the 350s, the 300s, AD, seemed to have been a very difficult period climatically across the world. And the Huns swept out of Central Asia, this group of people who were classified as a militarized nomadic people. And I think there's probably no terrifying news you could have in the 300s or 400. as AD than to hear that a cloud of dust on the horizon is a militarized nomadic people, i.e. the Huns coming for you. The Huns were interested in capturing gold and silver and things

like that. They were simply interested in plunder rather than creating a territory for themselves. And so the Goths really, in many ways, were fleeing the Huns from the 350s until Attila in 452. Attila comes to the west. He's defeated in France at the Battle of Shalom by a combined army of Visigoths and Romans. So the Romans and the Visigoths got together to try to fight them off. And then he, in 452, ricocheted and came down to Italy and ultimately was probably sent on his way with a large helping of gold or silver from the Pope Leo the Great. But what we get are these increasingly large bands of tribesmen. You get the Visigoths who are the Western Goths, the Austro-Goths or the Eastern Goths, you get the vandals who ultimately go into North Africa.

They sack Rome, go into North Africa. So over the course of the 400s and 500s AD, you get successive bands coming into Italy, both as refugees, as people looking for plunder, and as people, as you say, hoping to join the empire, join the party and be part of the grandeur that Rome had been up until that point. I think this is quite interesting because you have these waves and waves of people. And I think a lot of the time when we talk about the successor states or the barbarian invasions, we are sort of meaning of the fifth century and in this particular time. But this does keep going into at least the sixth century, you know.

And you have this other big wave at this point in time when we have the lombards come down from Pannonia, right? And so can you tell us a little bit about them? Yes. in some ways you could date a more convincing date for the end of the empire in the West, more convincing than 476, when Romulus Augustulus was deposed, a time when if you lived somewhere in Italy or somewhere in France, you probably didn't notice that anything in particular had happened. And things probably ticked over as they had been for the previous couple of decades at least.

The huge change comes in 568 with the invasion of the lombards, who are this group, they would have originated in Scandinavia. One way to think about these barbarians is they're pre-vikings in some ways. And the Vikings, you could argue, are the last of the barbarian invaders, the Magyars from Hungary, and the Vikings are kind of equivalent. The Vikings are the Goths with boats who go attacking even farther afield. And so what we get with the Lombards are these people who have come from, originally Scandinavia. They're attested there in about the first second century AD, and then

they migrate south. And what we see continually happening are these migration patterns, which are probably governed, as I was saying earlier, by climatic events and things like that, or territorial struggles and rivalries between and among various tribes. The Lombards move into Pannonia, what is today, Hungary, and then they sweep into, in 568, they sweep into Italy. They come across the elves, maybe about 200,000 of them. And it is a cross between a war machine and an immigrant caravan or something like that. They seem to be transplanting themselves looking for the riches and the good life of Italy. Because one of the things that we have to think about the Goths and why they keep coming across the Alps and wanting to get into a more

Mediterranean location is agriculture had not developed in that part of the world and would not, in fact, develop for another four or 500 years at least, where they would get the heavy plow, which would turn up the soil from much deeper and allow the vegetation that was on top to go deeper into the soil and therefore give a kind of nitrogen enrichment to it. And also to break up what often was very stony soil or to have a kind of irrigation or a kind of drainage system that would clear some of the marshes. And so those lands of central Germany and Eastern Europe, where so many of these tribes came from, were not rich agriculturally. And so the people almost became nomadic. And so Italy is a place where they felt they would have a good life. And perhaps that's what the Lombards wanted.

And so the Lombards came across in 568 and fought for the better part of a couple of decades before really by about 600 they had taken over most of northern Italy. And in some ways it was disastrous. The Lombards are the barbarians who came and stayed because the Ostrogoths, the group that Theodoric was the king of, the Austrogoths had been ousted from Italy by the Byzantines during the Gothic Wars in the middle part of the 500s. The Emperor Justinian, the first, Justinian the Great, was attempting to restore the empire. And he very nearly did so with his great general Belisarius. He recaptured North Africa. He recaptured most of Italy from the Ostrogoths and really reconstituted

the borders of the old Roman Empire in the West, at least. But all of that and is shattered by the Lombards who come and take the top half of Italy from the Byzantines. And the Lombards are not, at this stage at least, in their career, not an especially enlightened people. They're pagans, according to later reports, it may have been biased. They worshipped goats and things like that. And we're very violent people who, rather than having a Senate to govern them, would have war councils in which they would give their assent by banging their swords on their shields, which must have been a terrifying sound. So there were very warlike people and they ultimately took over the top half of Italy. As I say, the barbarians who came and stayed for the better part, they controlled that

top half of Italy and then parts of the south for the better part of a couple of centuries before our next group of invaders and barbarians come, which once again, people from north of the Alps, which is the Franks, were invited into Italy to help to get rid of the Lombards, and maybe to get rid of the Byzantines as well. So what you get in this period from really the 400s until the 6,700s, are successive waves of people coming across the Alps and taking control of parts of Italy and fragmenting it.

I mean, this is what is going to be the sort of fish hook in the heart of all the Italian nationalists of the 18th and 19th century that Italy has been fragmented. Italy in Italian is known as, Mostivalet, the boot. And, you know, one of the jokes is it's shaped like a boot because everyone walked all over it. And that certainly was what appeared to be happening in the course of these barbarian invasions.

That is so apt because we're not even done. Sure, you have these waves and waves that come from over the Alps. But then, of course, you know, one of the most seismic events, really, in the medieval period, is then the rise of Islam. And then suddenly, from the south and in Sicily, we have. an incredible influx of Islamic people. Isn't that right? That's right. And so you could say that if the first invaders of Italy really came over the Alps and swept down from the north of the peninsula, suddenly Muhammad died in 632, and the war fleets began sweeping out of the Arabian Peninsula. And so what you get beginning in the 9th century,

in the 800s AD, are the Muslims having taken northern Al-A.S.' Africa now have a base from which to attack into Sicily. And then ultimately, and they more or less conquer Sicily by about 900s over the course of a couple of decades. They take virtually all of it. There's still a few enclaves that they had not taken possession of. But really, by 900, they're in control of Sicily. And you have the Islamic Emirate of Sicily, which survives for a couple of centuries. And you also then on the mainland of Italy as well, have.

of an Islamic Emirate, likewise, what today is Bari, down in the heel of Italy, became the Islamic Emirate of Bara, B-A-R-A-H. And so for several generations, you had Islamic leaders who were transplants from Moorish Africa who ruled over this small enclave of Italy. So simultaneously, and let's say around the 800s, 9-00s, you had small chunks in Italy and almost all of Sicily as Islamic Emirates ruled by Islamic people. These are some of my favorite parts of Italy. I absolutely love seeing these waves of varying cultures. I like to spend time in Marsala, which was the port of Allah, right?

It's like the Marsa Allah, I think it was the name of it at the time. But then especially in Sicily, I find this so interesting because we've got another wave of former barbarians then that comes after that. So talking of the Vikings who sort of become Lombards, who sort of become Italians, you know, we've got the Vikings who sort of became French, who are the Normans, who then show up in the 11th century. And they have a massive impact on culture, do they not? Yes, yes.

And again, it's this same pattern of, you know, if we think of the Viking template, the Vikings are ultimately in the early 900s AD in order to control these guys who sailed up the Sen and Sack Paris, and to keep them happy, they're given land in France. They're given Normandy. And from Normandy, a century or so later, you get these bands of mercenaries. So once a Viking, always a Viking, perhaps. So these Normans fetch up in Italy and act as mercenaries. Because what's happening in Italy in the 11th century is there's a struggle, especially in southern Italy between the Lombards who are still there, although by this point, the Lombards have been there for so long, you almost have to begin thinking of them as Italians. Many generations now, they've

been living on the peninsula. I mean, they're in a power struggle with the Byzantines, because the Byzantines fought back and were continually fighting back and took over a good part of southern Italy, sort of the in-step, the heel, the ankle of Italy. And the Lombards, the locals, we can almost think of them at this point, begin fighting the Byzantines. Because the Byzantines, after all, are based in Constantinople. And so what you get is a very aloof leader, the Byzantine emperor, who's not really interested in local affairs in Italy.

And so the Lombards begin rebelling against the Byzantines, and they call in help from these Burlington, He flecks and haired guys who've fetched up recently from France to protect pilgrims going to the Holy Land and also to aid whoever wants them. They're basically soldiers of fortune, mercenaries, who will aid people in any local disputes. And so what happens over the next few decades in the 11th centuries you get the Normans fighting the Byzantines with the Lombards and then occasionally fighting the Lombards for the Byzantines. They would sort of switch allegiance with the carefree conscience that most mercenaries

seem to have. But then ultimately, of course, what happens is they initially came just to help out with their military muscle, but ultimately then they get land and they begin taking over parts of southern Italy and then more especially as you were referencing Sicily, because they, by 1,100, they have effectively taken Sicily back from the Islamic Emirate. and have turned it now into what ultimately becomes the kingdom of Sicily, which is ruled by the Normans. The Normans in Sicily are some of my favorite guys because they eventually lead to one of my favorite emperors, who is Frederick II. And I'm a Holy Roman imperial specialist, right? So for me, I really enjoy seeing the ways that we have this very specific kind of Norman culture adapt and take advantage of the systems that are in place on the Italian Peninsula.

And I think we would be remiss not to then begin talking about, of course, the papacy. Because I think that everyone when they think of medieval Italy, the papacy is one of the first things that springs to mind. And quite right, too, I'm not saying that they shouldn't. But I find that earlier on in the medieval period, you know, the papacy is spending rather a lot of time, just jumping up and down and saying, we're important, everyone, we're important. You know, and Constantinople doesn't think they're important. They're just kind of like, that's the bishop of Rome. But there's this incredible story that emerges of the papacy becoming this amazing legal machine. And how do they do this, I guess is the question.

How do you go from being a bishop of Rome? Well, the bishop of Rome originally comes from the idea that, as the Gospel of St. Matthew says, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And the symbol of the papacy is the crossed keys. So Peter is the first pope. Peter's martyrdom or possible martyrdom in, because there's some dispute about whether he actually set foot in Rome, the minority report says no. But of course, his mission was important. Wherever he went or didn't go, his mission was important. And so Peter becomes Bishop of Rome. He's known as

the Bishop of Rome. Ultimately, that position mutates into that of the Pope. But a way of thinking how the church became important and why the popes became powerful in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages is what happened in 452 is Attila sweeps into Italy and he has his eye on Rome. He wants the riches of Rome. But he stops at Ravenna, which is the capital of the empire at that time. Ravenna is going to be less vulnerable than Rome because of the fact that it is, you know, largely surrounded by water. And these barbarians are coming on horseback rather than by boat. And so what happens is who goes out to treat with Attila, to meet with him face to face,

to confront him and negotiate, not the Emperor Valentinius III, who's the reigning emperor at that time, Valentinius is probably under his bed at this time in the royal palace hiding. Who goes out to meet him is Pope Leo, Leo the Great. And so this is something that then gives a great deal of prestige to the papacy, that what you get really from this point on are the bishops of Rome, or subsequently the popes stepping into the shoes of the Roman emperors, because as the empire collapses and its whole institutional framework falls apart, there is a vacuum, an administrative political,

and also a cultural vacuum. And into that vacuum comes the papacy and the church, more especially. And so what you get in the far-flung regions of the former empire in the West as you get the administration and governance taken over by bishops, the local Roman officials are now gone. And so it is the church officials who take over. And they provide a kind of stability and continuity as a force, that gives a kind of cultural prestige to recognize the cultural prestige of Rome and continues

that, continues it because of the fact that we get scribes and scholars, monks, copying out manuscripts by Cicero and Livy and people like that and really restoring the handing on to future generations, future centuries, future millennia, literary output of ancient Rome. And so the church really continues, and it puts it onto a different track and is more concerned with the city of God than the earthly city that the Romans were concerned with. But we get this cultural leadership coming from the church as well as its administrative and governing apparatus. I suppose now that you've mentioned, the important literary works that the church is doing,

it's very difficult to not then briefly check in with our good friend Charlemagne, right, who uses the church to not only reinforce his position as the Holy Roman Emperor, but also to take on the same idea that the new Rome, the Roman Empire, should always be trying to continue with the legacy of the old one and put these literary things. But we do see, even though Charlemagne starts out being a big fan of the papacy and using the papacy in all these ways, the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire does establish a rivalry, I would say, the papal imperial rivalry. And is this something that we see more particularly on the Italian peninsula? In many ways, what happened on Christmas Day in the year 800 in Rome would haunt Italy

for many, many centuries. Because what happened then is, if we think of a certain British politician who got ambushed with a cake in Downing Street, Charlemagne claimed he was ambushed with a crown on Christmas Day. In the year 800, he just innocently attended church, and the Pope ended up putting a crown on his head. And he was acclaimed the new Augustus. And so he becomes a new imperial figure. And this is sort of the final details of this were obviously not worked out. He was crowned by the pope. But all sorts of questions are raised. If the Pope crowns him, does that mean the Pope can also depose him, and the popes can depose any future emperor. Does the imperial power of the Holy Roman emperors, and that's the new title that Charlemagne gets, he's Roman emperor, but he's holy Roman emperor.

He becomes a kind of defender of the faith, and I think he took quite seriously his, what he regarded as his job of defending Christianity, because he said in the West it could not be defended by the Byzantine Emperor who was too remote and who was beset with all sorts of rivalries and incursions and things like that. And so Charlemagne saw himself as the guy who was going to be the protector of Christianity in the West. But of course, as you say, what happens is this dreadful conflict, which will flare up with dreadful regularity over the next few centuries, who has ultimate power on the Italian peninsula, but also. you could say in the Holy Roman Empire itself, in present-day France and Germany, who has ultimate power?

Is it the Pope who crowns the emperor? And does the emperor have any sort of control and say in, for example, the making of bishops and archbishops and people like that? The spheres of influence were not demarcated strongly enough in 800. And so what you get is conflict between the Holy Roman emperors and the popes. And as I say, this drags on endlessly and flares up constantly and leads to various wars and battles on the Italian peninsula. Speaking of wars and battles on the Italian peninsula, I think one of the things that most of us think of when we think of medieval Italy is, of course, the city states. Venice and Florence and Genoa and Pisa. And they really emerge kind of in the later medieval period and certainly the high medieval period

as the major players other than the papacy on the Italian peninsula. But it's a patchwork, right? So how are these guys interacting with each other? And is it friendly? Is it rivalry? Pisa and Florence hate each other. But do they all always not get along? They don't get along often if they're neighbors.

because they're engaged, as we would expect, in territorial disputes. But they also go to war over things like trading rights and things like that. There was the war of Kioja between Venice and Genoa in the 12th century, where they were contending for maritime power and trading privileges in the East. It's such a nice story that begins developing after, let's say, the year 1,000, because we get, if you try to think of Italy as the Dark Ages, or if you try to think the Middle Ages as dark ages, what happens in the 1000s and 1100s really scuppers that epithet because of the fact that you get these very vibrant cities developing

because of the fact that the Holy Roman emperors cannot impose themselves with any real authority in Italy at this time because after all, they're headquartered north of the Alps in Germany, most of them don't take all that much interest in it from, say, after Charlemagne's time, because the Carolingian Empire begins to break up. And there isn't enough will or strength for them to impose themselves. So you get these cities like Florence, like Pisa, Genoa, the new city of Venice, which developed four or five hundreds AD. You get them developing.

And in the political vacuum that exists there, they begin governing themselves. They become effectively republic, some of them. And they govern themselves. And because of the fact that they have, Some of them are on the water, such as Venice, Genoa Pisa, Amalfi also. They become great trading powers, and they become very wealthy, bringing luxury goods from the east, sending grains and things like that away to other ports. And so you get this great commercial prosperity happening at this time. And so if we want to think of the Middle Ages as a thousand years where everyone was poor, that's simply not true.

And historians really call that period from 1,000 to 1,300, when a kind of rot does begin to set in, they call that period the high Middle Ages, the good Middle Ages, or it's the period in which there is a kind of prosperity. But also, yes, as you say, there are also these rivalries and wars that break out between and among them, and are going to continue really for many centuries after that. Because once again, this is something that Italy is divided, Italy is broken up into. all of these different city states and in the South Kingdom. So it's something that's far from unified and constantly in conflict with itself. These are absolutely massively wealthy places.

You see this all throughout the Middle Ages across Europe. Everyone always talks about it. You know, everybody knows how much money Venice has. You know, Venice has an empire. You know, they're controlling half the Greek islands down there. You know, there's all kinds of incredible things happening in Venice. But this creates this incredible economic prosperity. As you mentioned, it also means that there are these rivalries.

And I always kind of argue that this is key to the very late medieval, very early modern, birth of what we now call the Renaissance, right? Because sure, the Renaissance is this wonderful outpouring of beautiful art from people like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. But it's also a great way of competing. if you're a really rich guy, right? So you see these city-states become these key artistic centers. And can you tell us a bit about how this comes about? Well, one of the ways to think about it is if you follow the money and go to the economics of it, you cannot have great art unless someone is writing the checks for it.

Someone's paying the bill. And also someone who has not just the wherewithal to pay the bill, but someone who wants to become a cultural leader in his community by commissioning, and I shouldn't just say he, because there were plenty of female patrons, especially in the 1400s as well, people who wanted to leave behind a kind of legacy of him or herself, but also wanted to beautify their town, their city. And that's one of the touching things, perhaps we could say, as the Renaissance develops, that you get this civic pride, the pride in the community. that in the city of Florence or in Venice, there is a communal feeling that people have,

that they're ruling themselves, they're in a republic, they're all in it together. Many of them are stakeholders. They can hold office and they can vote. Florence, the city of about 40,000 in the early 1400s, had about 5,000 people who could hold office, which doesn't quite fulfill our demand for democracy, but compared to many places, it was fairly respectable. And so you get a kind of civic prize. And there are facades of buildings done in Florence and frescoes that were commissioned by wealthy merchants. And the merchants will often write in the contract or they'll write in their day book, their sort of memorandum book, that they're doing this for the greater glory of God, which of course they always take that greater glory of God as a legacy to myself and my descendants. So it's for family pride.

and then they always put for the greater glory of the community, of the civic body as well. And so it's these three things. It's God, family and country, you could say, God, family and city that they're doing this for. And as I say, they have the wherewithal to do it because they've become some of them, such as the Medici or the Patsi or the Strotsi, they've become fabulously wealthy. And they want to use their wealth to beautify the community. Do you think this is a specifically Italian ideal? You know, because it is something that we do see come very specifically out of Italy.

Now, of course, there's also the Northern Renaissance, which is responsible for some of my very favorite art as well. But it's almost in a similar mode, you know, like when we see people from the lowlands who similarly live in very wealthy cities and they're making great works of art for their community, it is a fundamental fact that Italians did it first. So can we say that this is something that had to? happen, I suppose, in this milieu. Yes, it had to happen. Well, maybe it did not have to happen because lots of people are fabulously wealthy and do not give back to the community and don't want to pay taxes or whatever. But what happens in Italy is that you get in the 1300s and then more especially in

the first half of the 1400s, this intense interest in ancient Rome and the literature of ancient Rome and also Greece. So why perhaps you could justify not spending a lot of money on a beautiful Palazzo and commissioning a lot of artwork is that is conspicuous consumption. It's sinful to do that to put on that kind of a display. It's far too ostentatious. But what the Florentines especially found is that writers such as Aristotle would refer to magnificence and that magnificence is something good. A new theory of economics developed at that time. They discovered what they thought was the economic writings of Aristotle. He's now known as the pseudo-Arestotle.

He was probably one of Aristotle's students. And what we have are as class notes that he took as they strolled around the peripatos, and he jotted down what the master was saying. And so it probably is Aristotle's philosophy. And the philosophy isn't as simplistic as greed is good, But there is the idea of it's not sinful. There's nothing inherently wrong with making a magnificent display because that can do good in the community. Because, and I guess you could say maybe that Aristotle and then especially his followers in Florence, like Cosmo de Medici, believed in trickle-down economics and that this money is going to go out across the city.

But they also believed it's then going to inspire other people to create monuments and to beautify the city. and you get this kind of nuclear arms race of palace building in Florence, with each one having to be more spectacular than the last. And they all compete to get the greatest painters. And so, yes, it's conspicuous consumption, but it's done for what they believe is a good purpose. It's something that can be justified politically, culturally, and also morally, and also in terms of their immortal soul,

because they can justify it ecclesiastically, because, of course, much of the patronage is of churches and things such as that. Medici will take the Church of San Lorenzo under their control and begin writing the checks for it. Lourbico's Forza in Milan, the Duke of Milan, at the end of the 1400s, will take the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, a Dominican convent under his control, and begin writing the checks for the beautification of it and the enlargement of it. And so the church is the beneficiary of this private wealth. And so the church, of course, is in no great haste to denounce this kind of conspicuous consumption because of what is being done for it. I could keep you here for possibly the rest of your life, Ross, but I suppose that now we're in the 16th century and we're smack in the Renaissance. That's probably as good a place as I can find to end.

But before we wrap up, you have a book for those who don't want to stop learning about Italy at this point, right? Can you tell us a little bit? Exactly, I do. I have 3,000 years of it waiting for you in the latest book in the great shortest history series. I have the shortest history of Italy. You may find a shorter one, but that one will not cover 3,000 years of history. So it's the shortest history of Romulus and Remus do, the 21st century. Fantastic. And where can our listeners find that? That should be at all good bookshops everywhere. Fantastic. Ross, thank you, so much for taking time out of trying to compress thousands of years of history into a book to come and talk to us. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much

again to Ross for joining me. And thank you all for listening. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, drop us an email at gone medieval at historyhit.com, just like Hannah did. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back again on Friday, and as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.