the unrealized facts about Italian history
Jul. 3rd, 2008 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbRecently, I have been asked a couple of times for advice about books on Italian history. Well, oddly enough, I am not an expert on Italian history, at least not in the same way as I am in the areas I research. But I think that a part of the problem is that I have not met a master of Italian history, glorious and convincing, in the same way as I have met in other areas. Italians have written great history about other countries or other times, but Italian history is still without its Gibbon, its Lingard, its Michelet, its Chesterton even. The closest thing to Chesterton is the immensely popular history of the country written by the great journalist Indro Montanelli; but Montanelli has so many faults that, while I would encourage his work for an entry-level introduction to our long national story, I would not recommend practically any of his conclusions. And at any rate, I believe he has not been translated into English.
I said that I am no expert; but I am a historian with a wide spectrum of interests, and I certainly do know more about Italian history than the average person. And I have a suspicion that Italian history may possibly have been approached, historically, from altogether the wrong angle. One day, perhaps, I might start writing an account of my country from what I regard as a number of issues and inheritances that distort attitudes and do not allow the real weight of a number of things to be seen.
We might begin with the largest and best-known red herring of them all: the relationship of historical Italy - and by historical I mean medieval as well as modern - with the ancient empire which long ago grew from its territories. Nine times out of ten, people who visit Italy have the Roman Empire at the back of their minds; and the remains of that awesome phenomenon are indeed easily visible, proud and wonderful in the sunlight. But that there is a direct cultural, political, social continuity between Rome and Italy... that is much more dubious.
This is how things are. When the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist in 476, it left behind a vast kingdom - equal in territory to modern Italy without the islands, but with Provence, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia - ruled by a Gothic king, but according to Roman law and with the unchanged, untransmuted Roman administration still collecting tax and running the country in the unchanged Roman way. However, the eastern half of the Roman Empire had survived the crisis; and in the early sixth century, it launched a ferocious attempt to take Italy back from the Goths. The war lasted eighteen years, and tore up Italy from the foundations; and by the time the Eastern Romans (or Byzantines) finally broke the back of Gothic resistance, they had also managed to destroy the whole Roman administrative structure of the country. Recognizing this, they ruled Italy as a conquered country, by military government - and taxed it unmercifully.
The results were not slow to happen. In 568, after thirteen years of rapacious military occupation, a small and thus far despised Germanic tribe, the Longobards, was pushed out of their territory - in a corner of present-day Hungary - by the rising power of the Avars. Led by king Alboinus or Aelfwine, who had been a mercenary in the Byzantine wars, they entered Italy's fertile north-east - and the whole Byzantine structure of colonial control came crashing down. Except for the professional Byzantine soldiers shut up behind the massive walls of a few fortress cities, nobody would fight for the Empire. Alboinus besieged one such city - Papia, modern Pavia - for three years, starved it into surrender, and made it his capital; and he proclaimed himself King of the Longobards. Within ten years, a mighty Longobard band had made its home in Benevento, inland from Naples, from which it dominated almost the whole of southern Italy. For decades the situation was unsettled, but in so far as it changed at all, it changed constantly in favour of the Longobards. By the seventh century, they were the masters of nearly all of Italy; the Byzantines being restricted to the two ancient imperial capitals, Rome and Ravenna, plus a few fortresses at various points on the southern coast, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. THe rest of Italy was Longobardia.
This is important because it is my view that the origin of the Italian nation, of what was to become the Italy of Dante, Leonardo, Vivaldi, and Verdi, and that is still a clearly recognizable and highly individual nation in Europe today, is in the Longobard kingdom. The atrocious Byzantine invasion had devastated the native Roman culture, and ended up treating the natives pretty much like aliens; and when the Longobards came, they did not simply take over existing Roman structures like the Goths and even the Franks had done before, but improvise a largely new country. In every way, Longobardia was unlike Rome. Escavations in the city of Pisa have shown that the Roman central building ceased to be used and were largely re-made or destroyed at the time when the Longobards took over. Unlike the law codes of earlier invaders, which were modelled on Roman law even when they weren't direct borrowings from Roman law, the law of the Longobards was decidedly native and Teutonic in character. Its basic concepts were not Roman, and neither was its language, even when king Rothari (Hrothgar) translated it into Latin. And it is important to remember that it was the law of Rothari - expanded, added to, modified, but never rejected - that remained the basis of Italian law for at least five centuries - until, that is, the twelfth century. It even became the law of Byzantine outposts such as Naples, that had never been Longobard at all. And this reflects an important phenomenon: that the success of the Longobards in redesigning Italy essentially forced its logic even on their enemies. The Roman state was centralized; Longobardia was so feudal as to count as little more than a coalition of local Dukes, each with his stone-walled city for a command post. The collapse of Byzantium's Italian colony essentially forced this multiplication of little power centres on the Byzantines themselves. Every Byzantine fortress became itself the head of a small Byzantine colony with its own identity. And it is from this multiplicity of little local capitals that developed the multitudinous city-state of medieval Italy. In a few centuries, two former Byzantine fortresses, Venice and Amalfi, were to start on the long history of Italian sea power.
Rothari's law was the law of Italy until the eleven hundreds. Then a growth in education and wealth led, among other things, to the re-discovery of Roman law. The codes of Theodosius and Justinian had of course continued to exist in ancient libraries, but they had not been used until a generation of eager legal scholars pulled them out of their ancient shelves and started trying to apply them to contemporary reality. The resurrection of Roman law in thirteenth-century Italy, and for that matter in thirteenth-century Europe, is best described as a romantic phenomenon, almost an infatuation. It has the classic romantic feature of turning from a comfortable reality where the past feeds seamlessly into the present, to a past more distant, more imaginary, almost superhumanly imposing, and more morally constrictive, a past separated from the present by a wall of mediocrity and distance, irrecoverable yet commanding. From Cola di Rienzo to Mussolini, Italians turn from the present of Italy to the history of Rome in a spirit of romanticism, nostalgia and rebellion. The relationship of the country with what preceded it in time is never uncomplicated, direct, familiar. When the symbols and realities of power and law come together in Italy, they come under medieval colours - the communes, conscious successors of the medieval city states, often housed in the same civic buildings (the commune of Florence meet to this day in the halls of Palazzo Vecchio, decorated by Michelangelo and his likes), displaying armorial symbols and carrying medieval Gonfaloni or standards. The best way I can express it is this: that to this day, the mayor of the local authority who is preceded by his town's Gonfalone during a civic ceremony would feel nothing wrong with the act; whereas, if anyone had the bright idea of being preceded by twelve lictores with fasces, the symbol of public power in ancient Rome, everyone would feel that this was Carnival and there was nothing serious about it.
The gonfaloni of the saint and the town in a small town procession
And that is not just because Mussolini took the Fasces as symbols of his party; to the contrary, Mussolini took them as symbols of his party because they stood for that romantic "Roman" dream that stood so far against the modern Italian reality.
Here is the first point to be understood, then: Italy is not Rome. To the contrary, both Greece and France have a less troubled and conflictual relationship with the ancient Empire. It is not the Italians who, to this day, sometimes forget themselves and call themselves rhomaioi. Italy is the multiplicity of small, autonomous towns from which Longobard and Byzantine lords protected their friends and rode out to meet their enemies; and which, from time to time, goes to sleep, and tossing and turning uneasily, dreams of Rome.
Then there is the issue of the nation state. I may post, in the future, about the reason why the nation state is in crisis in a couple of places in Europe; but the issue with Italy is quite different. Through most of its history, Italy felt compellingly the need to be a nation - to speak the same language, have the same religion, the same institutions, the same culture - at the same time as she never seriously thought of becoming a state. Some of the Italian cities grew to be world powers in their own right; but this did not encourage Venice to throw off the recognized Italian language in favour of its own attractive and expressive Venetian dialect. Even at the height of Venetian glory, and even when the rest of Italy or even of Europe turned against Venice, it still mattered too much, inexplicably, for a Venetian to be able to go to distant Naples, to Rome, or even among enemies in Genoa, and know himself to be of one nation with his guests. Indeed, the very adoption of the Italian language was an act of will on the part of the whole nation. Italian is the dialect of Florence, linguistically unrelated to most of the country's other dialects and indeed barely mutually comprehensible with them; but it became the default choice for national language because of the literary triumphs of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. It might just as well have been the Sicilian of the first Italian vernacular poets, or the Venetian of the merchants - but for the fact that greater writers were born by the Arno. But one language had to be adopted by the whole country, and one language was. By the time Petrarch died, Florentine was Italian, with no distinction or difference.
However, by the early nineteenth century, Italians began to perceive that history had left Italy behind. The country was reduced again to what it had been more than a thousand years before: the exploited, occupied and impoverished outpost of an alien empire. The Austrians had replaced the Byzantines. It was ultimately clear to every politically aware Italian that Italy could never develop without unity, because only unity would make it strong enough to avoid becoming someone else's protectorate. And unity was achieved: but at the price of sowing two more spiritual divisions in the country. The first was the new idea of patriotism. Italian history began to be looked at exclusively from the viewpoint of unity - longed for, postponed, lost - and figures all the way back to Dante, who had never even had any idea of a separate Italian state, were assessed and judged exclusively according to the role they had played in a consummation that was to come many centuries after they had died. This treated the native and inevitable polycentric quality of Italian history as nothing but an evil to be overcome, and came to the point of seeing destructive scoundrels such as Gian Galeazzo Visconti and even Cesare Borgia, as putative national heroes, for having come close to gathering the whole country together under one conquering iron fist. That such a conquest would have been both ruinous and short-lived, Italian historians after Unity neither could nor wanted to see.
The second division brought into the Italian body is, of course, that against the Church. United Italy had, out of necessity, to be made by dispossessing the Pope, who was king of Rome and of much of central and northern Italy. For a long time, the country's religion was at odds with the country's patriotism, and the conflict is even now not wholly healed.
There are other things I would like to say, but these are some of the problems I have with the way Italian history is taught and studied.
I said that I am no expert; but I am a historian with a wide spectrum of interests, and I certainly do know more about Italian history than the average person. And I have a suspicion that Italian history may possibly have been approached, historically, from altogether the wrong angle. One day, perhaps, I might start writing an account of my country from what I regard as a number of issues and inheritances that distort attitudes and do not allow the real weight of a number of things to be seen.
We might begin with the largest and best-known red herring of them all: the relationship of historical Italy - and by historical I mean medieval as well as modern - with the ancient empire which long ago grew from its territories. Nine times out of ten, people who visit Italy have the Roman Empire at the back of their minds; and the remains of that awesome phenomenon are indeed easily visible, proud and wonderful in the sunlight. But that there is a direct cultural, political, social continuity between Rome and Italy... that is much more dubious.
This is how things are. When the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist in 476, it left behind a vast kingdom - equal in territory to modern Italy without the islands, but with Provence, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia - ruled by a Gothic king, but according to Roman law and with the unchanged, untransmuted Roman administration still collecting tax and running the country in the unchanged Roman way. However, the eastern half of the Roman Empire had survived the crisis; and in the early sixth century, it launched a ferocious attempt to take Italy back from the Goths. The war lasted eighteen years, and tore up Italy from the foundations; and by the time the Eastern Romans (or Byzantines) finally broke the back of Gothic resistance, they had also managed to destroy the whole Roman administrative structure of the country. Recognizing this, they ruled Italy as a conquered country, by military government - and taxed it unmercifully.
The results were not slow to happen. In 568, after thirteen years of rapacious military occupation, a small and thus far despised Germanic tribe, the Longobards, was pushed out of their territory - in a corner of present-day Hungary - by the rising power of the Avars. Led by king Alboinus or Aelfwine, who had been a mercenary in the Byzantine wars, they entered Italy's fertile north-east - and the whole Byzantine structure of colonial control came crashing down. Except for the professional Byzantine soldiers shut up behind the massive walls of a few fortress cities, nobody would fight for the Empire. Alboinus besieged one such city - Papia, modern Pavia - for three years, starved it into surrender, and made it his capital; and he proclaimed himself King of the Longobards. Within ten years, a mighty Longobard band had made its home in Benevento, inland from Naples, from which it dominated almost the whole of southern Italy. For decades the situation was unsettled, but in so far as it changed at all, it changed constantly in favour of the Longobards. By the seventh century, they were the masters of nearly all of Italy; the Byzantines being restricted to the two ancient imperial capitals, Rome and Ravenna, plus a few fortresses at various points on the southern coast, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. THe rest of Italy was Longobardia.
This is important because it is my view that the origin of the Italian nation, of what was to become the Italy of Dante, Leonardo, Vivaldi, and Verdi, and that is still a clearly recognizable and highly individual nation in Europe today, is in the Longobard kingdom. The atrocious Byzantine invasion had devastated the native Roman culture, and ended up treating the natives pretty much like aliens; and when the Longobards came, they did not simply take over existing Roman structures like the Goths and even the Franks had done before, but improvise a largely new country. In every way, Longobardia was unlike Rome. Escavations in the city of Pisa have shown that the Roman central building ceased to be used and were largely re-made or destroyed at the time when the Longobards took over. Unlike the law codes of earlier invaders, which were modelled on Roman law even when they weren't direct borrowings from Roman law, the law of the Longobards was decidedly native and Teutonic in character. Its basic concepts were not Roman, and neither was its language, even when king Rothari (Hrothgar) translated it into Latin. And it is important to remember that it was the law of Rothari - expanded, added to, modified, but never rejected - that remained the basis of Italian law for at least five centuries - until, that is, the twelfth century. It even became the law of Byzantine outposts such as Naples, that had never been Longobard at all. And this reflects an important phenomenon: that the success of the Longobards in redesigning Italy essentially forced its logic even on their enemies. The Roman state was centralized; Longobardia was so feudal as to count as little more than a coalition of local Dukes, each with his stone-walled city for a command post. The collapse of Byzantium's Italian colony essentially forced this multiplication of little power centres on the Byzantines themselves. Every Byzantine fortress became itself the head of a small Byzantine colony with its own identity. And it is from this multiplicity of little local capitals that developed the multitudinous city-state of medieval Italy. In a few centuries, two former Byzantine fortresses, Venice and Amalfi, were to start on the long history of Italian sea power.
Rothari's law was the law of Italy until the eleven hundreds. Then a growth in education and wealth led, among other things, to the re-discovery of Roman law. The codes of Theodosius and Justinian had of course continued to exist in ancient libraries, but they had not been used until a generation of eager legal scholars pulled them out of their ancient shelves and started trying to apply them to contemporary reality. The resurrection of Roman law in thirteenth-century Italy, and for that matter in thirteenth-century Europe, is best described as a romantic phenomenon, almost an infatuation. It has the classic romantic feature of turning from a comfortable reality where the past feeds seamlessly into the present, to a past more distant, more imaginary, almost superhumanly imposing, and more morally constrictive, a past separated from the present by a wall of mediocrity and distance, irrecoverable yet commanding. From Cola di Rienzo to Mussolini, Italians turn from the present of Italy to the history of Rome in a spirit of romanticism, nostalgia and rebellion. The relationship of the country with what preceded it in time is never uncomplicated, direct, familiar. When the symbols and realities of power and law come together in Italy, they come under medieval colours - the communes, conscious successors of the medieval city states, often housed in the same civic buildings (the commune of Florence meet to this day in the halls of Palazzo Vecchio, decorated by Michelangelo and his likes), displaying armorial symbols and carrying medieval Gonfaloni or standards. The best way I can express it is this: that to this day, the mayor of the local authority who is preceded by his town's Gonfalone during a civic ceremony would feel nothing wrong with the act; whereas, if anyone had the bright idea of being preceded by twelve lictores with fasces, the symbol of public power in ancient Rome, everyone would feel that this was Carnival and there was nothing serious about it.
The gonfaloni of the saint and the town in a small town procession
And that is not just because Mussolini took the Fasces as symbols of his party; to the contrary, Mussolini took them as symbols of his party because they stood for that romantic "Roman" dream that stood so far against the modern Italian reality.
Here is the first point to be understood, then: Italy is not Rome. To the contrary, both Greece and France have a less troubled and conflictual relationship with the ancient Empire. It is not the Italians who, to this day, sometimes forget themselves and call themselves rhomaioi. Italy is the multiplicity of small, autonomous towns from which Longobard and Byzantine lords protected their friends and rode out to meet their enemies; and which, from time to time, goes to sleep, and tossing and turning uneasily, dreams of Rome.
Then there is the issue of the nation state. I may post, in the future, about the reason why the nation state is in crisis in a couple of places in Europe; but the issue with Italy is quite different. Through most of its history, Italy felt compellingly the need to be a nation - to speak the same language, have the same religion, the same institutions, the same culture - at the same time as she never seriously thought of becoming a state. Some of the Italian cities grew to be world powers in their own right; but this did not encourage Venice to throw off the recognized Italian language in favour of its own attractive and expressive Venetian dialect. Even at the height of Venetian glory, and even when the rest of Italy or even of Europe turned against Venice, it still mattered too much, inexplicably, for a Venetian to be able to go to distant Naples, to Rome, or even among enemies in Genoa, and know himself to be of one nation with his guests. Indeed, the very adoption of the Italian language was an act of will on the part of the whole nation. Italian is the dialect of Florence, linguistically unrelated to most of the country's other dialects and indeed barely mutually comprehensible with them; but it became the default choice for national language because of the literary triumphs of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. It might just as well have been the Sicilian of the first Italian vernacular poets, or the Venetian of the merchants - but for the fact that greater writers were born by the Arno. But one language had to be adopted by the whole country, and one language was. By the time Petrarch died, Florentine was Italian, with no distinction or difference.
However, by the early nineteenth century, Italians began to perceive that history had left Italy behind. The country was reduced again to what it had been more than a thousand years before: the exploited, occupied and impoverished outpost of an alien empire. The Austrians had replaced the Byzantines. It was ultimately clear to every politically aware Italian that Italy could never develop without unity, because only unity would make it strong enough to avoid becoming someone else's protectorate. And unity was achieved: but at the price of sowing two more spiritual divisions in the country. The first was the new idea of patriotism. Italian history began to be looked at exclusively from the viewpoint of unity - longed for, postponed, lost - and figures all the way back to Dante, who had never even had any idea of a separate Italian state, were assessed and judged exclusively according to the role they had played in a consummation that was to come many centuries after they had died. This treated the native and inevitable polycentric quality of Italian history as nothing but an evil to be overcome, and came to the point of seeing destructive scoundrels such as Gian Galeazzo Visconti and even Cesare Borgia, as putative national heroes, for having come close to gathering the whole country together under one conquering iron fist. That such a conquest would have been both ruinous and short-lived, Italian historians after Unity neither could nor wanted to see.
The second division brought into the Italian body is, of course, that against the Church. United Italy had, out of necessity, to be made by dispossessing the Pope, who was king of Rome and of much of central and northern Italy. For a long time, the country's religion was at odds with the country's patriotism, and the conflict is even now not wholly healed.
There are other things I would like to say, but these are some of the problems I have with the way Italian history is taught and studied.
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Date: 2008-07-04 04:17 pm (UTC)