Italy as a nation - chapter one
Mar. 18th, 2011 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIt’s not easy being Italian. The shadow of a colossal past looms over daily life virtually from every street-corner and building, threatening to reduce every daily act of the living to insignificance. It is difficult to explain it to others as to understand it ourselves, but there always is a suspicion in Italian minds that every concrete action, let alone compromise, may somehow be letting the side down, be falling short of some unstated and indeed unrealized level of heroic morality that ought to dominate our activities to the exclusion of everything else. Italians feel inwardly guilty at anything that even feels like compromise, even though compromise is necessary and mostly sane.
Of course, this is true to some extent of every nation. There is no country with no heroic memories, no personal paragons, no political or cultural heroes. Americans in their day to day life may well feel that the present falls pitifully short of those fathers and leaders of the past, whose presence seems sometimes as much larger than daily reality as their faces carved on Mount Rushmore. Germans read Springer papers and watch state TV with the subconscious knowledge that their country gave life to these fellows; over everything French hangs the shadow of Napoleon – a wicked shadow, in my view, but certainly big enough; and it was just the country whose military glory shines almost to the expense of everything else that, perhaps to keep its mental balance, created, at the very height of that glory, the greatest myth ever composed – Don Quixote – of the distance between the glory of the mind and of imagined memory, and the drollery and commonplace of daily life. And Cervantes, mind you, had borne a sword at Lepanto.
Italy, however, is all that in spades and redoubled. There is not one field of human activity in which someone or something Italian does not tower over the present, imposing impossible standards. Indeed, it might be said to be the very birth of the country, and part of its identity. As I have already argued, is a revolt against, and a retreat from, an impossible imperial identity. Italy is not to be identified with the ancient Roman Empire; the territory of modern and historical Italy was, in early Roman times, divided between half a dozen conflicting and distant cultures and many more nationalities, and by the time Rome had unified it under its own rule, she also ruled Greece, Tunisia, Dalmatia, Provence and most of Spain. The process of their conquest had been the same as the process of Rome’s conquest of Italy, and they entered the rising empire in the same ways and often under the same terms. And if Rome had destroyed Carthage and Corinth to the roots, well, she had also, and at the same time, destroyed the ancient and important Italian city of Fregellae; only to resurrect it later, as she did with Corinth and Carthage, as her own settlement.
The Italian entity, universally understood in mediaeval and modern times as a single nation as individual as France or Sweden, Castile or Germany, or Poland or England, begins in 568, when the king of a small and neglected Swabian tribe called the Longobards escapes the increasing pressure of the mighty Avars by leaving the Pannonian plain for the near reaches of north-eastern Italy. Italy had just been re-conquered by the Roman Empire – whose capital was by then in Constantinople – after eighteen years of one of the most terrible wars Europe ever saw; and King Alboin of the Longobards is said to have fought as a mercenary in the Byzantine army. However, whether he had come to appreciate the frightful weakness of the exploitative, high-taxing Empire in Italy, or whether he had just intended to sneak in and negotiate a role as a Roman ally, the simple impact of his war-band caused a crash that spread from one end of Italy to the other; and in ten years the Longobards were masters of most of northern Italy and strongly dug in in Tuscany and the South.
Recent historians projected the terrible story of modern German-Italian relationships on this distant canvas, and painted a picture of monstrous Nazi-like Longobards falling on terrified Italians and butchering and enslaving them like sheep. The facts tell another story. Our best witness by far for this period is Pope Gregory I the Great, whose well compiled and well preserved registry of official letters is full of precious detail. The Pope, himself a major landowner in Sicily, tells us of a Sicily swarming with refugee former landlords driven from their estates, but, significantly, there seem to be few or no members of the servile class: it is only the boss class, hand in glove with the Roman government, that found it worth its while to flee to the great island, where the Longobards, with no fleet or sailing skills, cannot go. What is more, there is movement in the opposite direction. The Pope tells the Governor of Corsica in so many words that his corruption and fiscal exactions are driving people to take refuge in Longobard-held areas. This, mind you, from Corsica, across the sea: people, in numbers large enough for the Pope to hear of it, are crossing the sea and taking the risk to go live under the control of uneducated barbarians, rather than put up with Roman rule a moment longer. Indeed, the Romans could only hold on to the greatest fortresses – Rome itself, which suffered a ten-year siege; the other imperial capital, Ravenna; a few fortresses thinly strung on the road between the two; and a bunch of fortified harbours such as Naples and Rivoaltus (the future Venice) that the Longobards did not even care to take. In effect, from now on the only part of Italy that is Roman is where Roman soldiers are quartered; everything else is Longobard practically by default. That is how the nation of Italy is slowly born, against and without Rome.
It was not just that the Longobards drove the Romans – by now a largely Greek and Oriental lot – out of most of Italy; they imposed their own model of society on the land to such an extent that even their Roman – later Byzantine – enemies were in effect shaped by it. The Roman Empire was highly centralized, especially in military matters; the Longobard state was based on highly autonomous dukedoms, each based on one fortified city. The Longobards took to Roman cities easily and immediately, but archaeological digs inside the walls of Pisa (it is rare and fortunate to be able to dig inside the walls of ancient Italian cities, because most of them have endured down the centuries and are still massively inhabited on the same sites as their ancestors were) have shown that the whole shape of the city was altered: Roman public buildings were abandoned and demolished, while new ones, some of which obviously important or public, were built on different sites, that had nothing to do with previous alignments. In short, the Longobards used and conceived their cities differently from their Roman predecessors; and while their actual patterns of behaviour are still not entirely clear, what is clear is that there is a continuous chain of succession that goes from the clean break represented by the Longobard fortress city, through the city-states of the Italian middle ages, to the polycentric pattern of modern Italy.
Last but not least, the Longobards defined the country itself. In Roman and post-Roman times, the territory called Italy had been variable in size and shape. The first barbaric kingdom that occupied the territory of modern Italy – except for the islands - was that of the Osrogoths, overthrown by the Romans before the Longobard invasion; but while Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica were all held by the North African kingdom of the Vandals, on the other hand it also included modern Croatia, both sides of the Alps down to the Danube, and the area of Provence and Dauphine’ all the way to the mouths of the Rhone. The sum total of these made for a very different territory from what we call Italy. The Longobards, however, made their home in the rich plains of northern Italy, and from there swiftly moved south, down the inevitable funnel of the Italian peninsula. The collapse of the Roman state drew them in, while in the trans-Alpine north and west the ongoing expansion of the Franks made the land inaccessible. This was Italy as Italy has remained since, give or take some contentious outlying regions (Savoy, Nice, Ticino, Dalmatia, Istria, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica). By opposing the Longobards as a matter of policy, the Romans/ Byzantines in effect accepted themselves the geo-political results of the Longobard invasion, which was to separate the two regions of the northern plains and the peninsula from any other part of Europe and make them into a unit; it was for the control of this particular area, rather than the lost provinces of Illyria and the transalpine land, that Romans and Longobards contended, leaving the rest, increasingly, to Franks and Avars. In terms of territory as well as of political organization and organized social life, Italy was increasingly defined as a unit for centuries to come.
Of course, this is true to some extent of every nation. There is no country with no heroic memories, no personal paragons, no political or cultural heroes. Americans in their day to day life may well feel that the present falls pitifully short of those fathers and leaders of the past, whose presence seems sometimes as much larger than daily reality as their faces carved on Mount Rushmore. Germans read Springer papers and watch state TV with the subconscious knowledge that their country gave life to these fellows; over everything French hangs the shadow of Napoleon – a wicked shadow, in my view, but certainly big enough; and it was just the country whose military glory shines almost to the expense of everything else that, perhaps to keep its mental balance, created, at the very height of that glory, the greatest myth ever composed – Don Quixote – of the distance between the glory of the mind and of imagined memory, and the drollery and commonplace of daily life. And Cervantes, mind you, had borne a sword at Lepanto.
Italy, however, is all that in spades and redoubled. There is not one field of human activity in which someone or something Italian does not tower over the present, imposing impossible standards. Indeed, it might be said to be the very birth of the country, and part of its identity. As I have already argued, is a revolt against, and a retreat from, an impossible imperial identity. Italy is not to be identified with the ancient Roman Empire; the territory of modern and historical Italy was, in early Roman times, divided between half a dozen conflicting and distant cultures and many more nationalities, and by the time Rome had unified it under its own rule, she also ruled Greece, Tunisia, Dalmatia, Provence and most of Spain. The process of their conquest had been the same as the process of Rome’s conquest of Italy, and they entered the rising empire in the same ways and often under the same terms. And if Rome had destroyed Carthage and Corinth to the roots, well, she had also, and at the same time, destroyed the ancient and important Italian city of Fregellae; only to resurrect it later, as she did with Corinth and Carthage, as her own settlement.
The Italian entity, universally understood in mediaeval and modern times as a single nation as individual as France or Sweden, Castile or Germany, or Poland or England, begins in 568, when the king of a small and neglected Swabian tribe called the Longobards escapes the increasing pressure of the mighty Avars by leaving the Pannonian plain for the near reaches of north-eastern Italy. Italy had just been re-conquered by the Roman Empire – whose capital was by then in Constantinople – after eighteen years of one of the most terrible wars Europe ever saw; and King Alboin of the Longobards is said to have fought as a mercenary in the Byzantine army. However, whether he had come to appreciate the frightful weakness of the exploitative, high-taxing Empire in Italy, or whether he had just intended to sneak in and negotiate a role as a Roman ally, the simple impact of his war-band caused a crash that spread from one end of Italy to the other; and in ten years the Longobards were masters of most of northern Italy and strongly dug in in Tuscany and the South.
Recent historians projected the terrible story of modern German-Italian relationships on this distant canvas, and painted a picture of monstrous Nazi-like Longobards falling on terrified Italians and butchering and enslaving them like sheep. The facts tell another story. Our best witness by far for this period is Pope Gregory I the Great, whose well compiled and well preserved registry of official letters is full of precious detail. The Pope, himself a major landowner in Sicily, tells us of a Sicily swarming with refugee former landlords driven from their estates, but, significantly, there seem to be few or no members of the servile class: it is only the boss class, hand in glove with the Roman government, that found it worth its while to flee to the great island, where the Longobards, with no fleet or sailing skills, cannot go. What is more, there is movement in the opposite direction. The Pope tells the Governor of Corsica in so many words that his corruption and fiscal exactions are driving people to take refuge in Longobard-held areas. This, mind you, from Corsica, across the sea: people, in numbers large enough for the Pope to hear of it, are crossing the sea and taking the risk to go live under the control of uneducated barbarians, rather than put up with Roman rule a moment longer. Indeed, the Romans could only hold on to the greatest fortresses – Rome itself, which suffered a ten-year siege; the other imperial capital, Ravenna; a few fortresses thinly strung on the road between the two; and a bunch of fortified harbours such as Naples and Rivoaltus (the future Venice) that the Longobards did not even care to take. In effect, from now on the only part of Italy that is Roman is where Roman soldiers are quartered; everything else is Longobard practically by default. That is how the nation of Italy is slowly born, against and without Rome.
It was not just that the Longobards drove the Romans – by now a largely Greek and Oriental lot – out of most of Italy; they imposed their own model of society on the land to such an extent that even their Roman – later Byzantine – enemies were in effect shaped by it. The Roman Empire was highly centralized, especially in military matters; the Longobard state was based on highly autonomous dukedoms, each based on one fortified city. The Longobards took to Roman cities easily and immediately, but archaeological digs inside the walls of Pisa (it is rare and fortunate to be able to dig inside the walls of ancient Italian cities, because most of them have endured down the centuries and are still massively inhabited on the same sites as their ancestors were) have shown that the whole shape of the city was altered: Roman public buildings were abandoned and demolished, while new ones, some of which obviously important or public, were built on different sites, that had nothing to do with previous alignments. In short, the Longobards used and conceived their cities differently from their Roman predecessors; and while their actual patterns of behaviour are still not entirely clear, what is clear is that there is a continuous chain of succession that goes from the clean break represented by the Longobard fortress city, through the city-states of the Italian middle ages, to the polycentric pattern of modern Italy.
Last but not least, the Longobards defined the country itself. In Roman and post-Roman times, the territory called Italy had been variable in size and shape. The first barbaric kingdom that occupied the territory of modern Italy – except for the islands - was that of the Osrogoths, overthrown by the Romans before the Longobard invasion; but while Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica were all held by the North African kingdom of the Vandals, on the other hand it also included modern Croatia, both sides of the Alps down to the Danube, and the area of Provence and Dauphine’ all the way to the mouths of the Rhone. The sum total of these made for a very different territory from what we call Italy. The Longobards, however, made their home in the rich plains of northern Italy, and from there swiftly moved south, down the inevitable funnel of the Italian peninsula. The collapse of the Roman state drew them in, while in the trans-Alpine north and west the ongoing expansion of the Franks made the land inaccessible. This was Italy as Italy has remained since, give or take some contentious outlying regions (Savoy, Nice, Ticino, Dalmatia, Istria, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica). By opposing the Longobards as a matter of policy, the Romans/ Byzantines in effect accepted themselves the geo-political results of the Longobard invasion, which was to separate the two regions of the northern plains and the peninsula from any other part of Europe and make them into a unit; it was for the control of this particular area, rather than the lost provinces of Illyria and the transalpine land, that Romans and Longobards contended, leaving the rest, increasingly, to Franks and Avars. In terms of territory as well as of political organization and organized social life, Italy was increasingly defined as a unit for centuries to come.
