The World of the Italian Renaissance by E. R. Chamberlin

Author:E. R. Chamberlin [Chamberlin, E. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance, Italy, General
ISBN: 9781000012309
Google: bs6gDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-02T03:03:21+00:00

5

The warrior princes

Like three suns blazing simultaneously in the sky, Renaissance Florence, Rome and Venice tend to blind the view of posterity to the activities of their contemporaries. The golden-tongued apologists of Florence, many of whom became enshrined in the national literature, the stability and longevity of Venice and the sheer mystique of Rome attract attention away from their neighbours. In the introduction to his study of Ferrara, Werner Gundersheimer remarks on the phenomenon and observes feelingly: ‘To choose to spend years in the study of a relatively little-known, medium-sized Renaissance despotism in a period when many of the best Renaissance scholars of one’s own and immediately past generations have devoted their energies to illuminating the history of its greatest republic, Florence, has sometimes seemed an idiosyncratic and perhaps somewhat marginal undertaking.’21

The ‘despots’, as individuals, have had a bad press or no press at all. Nineteenth-century historians, with their preoccupation with cultural, ie ‘courtly’, history, perforce had to recognise the world of the prince. But they tended to do so with an air of disdain. Burckhardt, their doyen, revels in the cultural details of the princely courts but is at pains to point out their vices, both moral and political. One of the reasons why earlier historians tended to concentrate on the republics, or to laud them, was either because they were themselves republicans, like the Swiss J. C. L. Sismondi (whose History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages has been described as ‘one long hymn to liberty followed by a funeral ode’), or because they were sympathisers. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the German scholar whose magisterial History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages still provides the major link between the classical and Renaissance city, for all his

Fondaco dei Tedeschi

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