After falling under French influence, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Pope sought refuge from the turbulence of the Roman people in Avignon, a papal fief outside of the ecclesiastical state; then came years of the greatest confusion in the Roman territory, and then the great schism with the councils of the fifteenth century. Although some of the Pope's servants, as early as the Council of Basel, were leaders among the Italian literati, yet the spirit of the renaissance cannot be said to have penetrated Rome and the Roman See, until after the Council of Ferrara, and the removal of this Council to Florence, until, in fact, after the residence of the Papal court in that city, and the election of a new Pope thoroughly pervaded by the spirit which there prevailed. From Florence, then, the new zeal was carried to Rome, and from the same centre all Italy received its quickening. Florence, then, although not strictly the birth-place, was the source from which the reviving influences spread through all Italy and the rest of Europe. But why did Florence take this position? The answer is to be found chiefly in its social and political life. If we look at the political history of Florence, we find it running nearly the same course, only later in time, with the other republics; but this tardiness of inevitable changes deferred the establishment of tyrannical power and the loss of a free spirit there until after letters and refinement had chosen it as their abode. Florence, in the earlier times of the middle ages, under a count and scabini, who were both judges and town council, had the Germanic constitution which prevailed almost everywhere. Out of this grew the government of consuls, four or six in number, with a complicated system of councils, four in number,-a constitution in which the quarters of the town were the leading rule in distributing power, and in which the power was lodged in the hands of the nobility. This nobility consisted of old landed proprietors, the descendants of Lombard or Frank conquerors, and of families enriched by merchandise, which, in the course of time, stood nearly on the level of the older aristocracy, as the plebeian optimates at Rome became at length the peers of the older patricians. Factions of nobles, under the party names of Guelphs and Ghibellines, but having no general political principle in view, quarreled for ascendency in the town, and banished one another after gaining the supremacy. Nor did the factions. confine themselves to these names, representing first the parties of the Pope and the Emperor, but one noble family was in strife with another or within itself, and the Guelphs, who were strong at Florence, could not keep the peace within their own body; the quarrel of the Bianchi and Neri, or whites and blacks, who were originally two Guelphic factions, is memorable for the banishment, in 1302, of six hundred partisans of the former, among whom was the poet Dante. While the turbulent nobility were weakening and destroying each other in this way, and to such an extent that a nuinber of the old families had disappeared before Dante wrote his great poem, the people, that is the middle class, not the operatives, combining in guilds, and growing wealthy through trade and manufactures, particularly that of woolen cloth, became strong enough to wrest power from the hands of the nobles. A governinent of the priors of the guilds, with two councils, more popularly constituted than the older ones, was now placed at the head of the state. It should be observed, however, that the guilds themselves differed in political rights, seven of them, among whom the cloth makers, cloth sellers, and money changers are especially deserving of notice, controlled the republic, while the smaller guilds, fourteen in number, had a much inferior position. From the time when the power of the nobility was broken, Florence grew in wealth and vigor, extended its sway over the neighboring country, and, although scarcely ever quiet for a long period, enjoyed comparative peace. The system of public economy, which the Emperor Frederic II. borrowed from the Mohammedans, and which erelong spread through Italy, gave rise to indirect taxes, and the civic struggles gave rise to state debts. These, again, with the great commercial enterprises of the Italian towns, aided in calling into existence a class of bankers, who, by and by, managed the concerns of a large part of Europe. Thus Edward III. of England was helped by the Lombards, as they were called, or money lenders from Italy, to carry on his wars with France; and Louis XI. of France was induced by Italian capitalists to abandon his trusty French banker, Jacques Coeur, and take an Italian one. Among the Italian towns, Vicenza, Asti, and Florence, are said to have furnished the most bankers; and among the Florentine bankers, the family of Medici at length occupied the leading place. Giovanni de' Medići, the banker of Pope John XXIII. at the time of the Council of Constance, and still more his son Cosimo (or Cosmo) were the chief citizens of the State, and owed their influence to their being at once wealthy and on the popular side. Cosimo, who was the Mæcenas of the age of the revival, became in 1433 an object of jealousy to the upper class and was sent into exile; but as the people missed his protection, and the money aristocracy really lost ground by his absence, he was soon restored, the power of the State went into the hands of his friends, and he spent the rest of his life in peace and the possession of undisturbed influence, until his death in 1464. No other man had so much to do with the revival of letters. His grandson; Lorenzo, and his great-grandson, Leo the Tenth, important as were their services to learning, only continued that protection of it, which their enlightened and more able ancestor, at a more critical time in the history of letters, had afforded. The principal influence of the political condition of Florence, thus briefly sketched, in fostering the revival of learning, seems to be this, that it had not parted with its freedom when the fullness of time for this event drew nigh, and that it was the abode of an opulent and enlightened class who had only a share in the government, and were not a dominant aristocracy. If we look at social life in Florence, we find there also causes tending to the same result. The wealthy class was not a haughty and ignorant class of proprietors living on their es tates, as in the kingdom of Naples, nor wild and refractory, as in the ecclesiastical state, nor crushed by the reigning dynast, as in parts of Italy, nor of too intense an aristocratical spirit, as in Venice; but enlightened, free to a considerable extent from the stolid pride of some aristocracies, disciplined by exten sive acquaintance with the world, addicted so far to the pursuits of commerce and industry that these were not accounted dishonorable, and by the constitution of the State not wholly absorbed in the management of its political affairs. By sharing with the burghers in the pursuits from which gain is acquired, they made the line fainter which separated the leading classes. It is not strange, therefore, that in the first half of the fifteenth century quite a number of accomplished men of this order were active patrons of letters, and learned themselves. Such were Roberto de' Rossi, a rich bachelor, who translated Aristotle, copied manuscripts of old authors, and instructed younger men of noble birth; Rinaldo degli Albizzi, the rival of Cosimo de' Medici and head of the aristocratic party; Palla de' Strozzi, who in his banishment at Padua took the Greek, John Argyropulus, into his house, as an interpreter of Aristotle, and himself translated works of Plutarch, Plato, and Chrysostom. Of other noblemen, as members of the Acciajoli family, Piero de' Pazzi, Matteo Palmieri, Leonardo de' Dati, Lapo da Castiglionchio, honorable mention is made in the books, on account of their patronage of Latin and Greek scholars, or their own proficiency in ancient letters.* Many others might be added to this list, persons who sustained the most honorable offices in the Florentine Republic, and filled their leisure hours with the study of Greek and Latin. who But although Florence was the centre from which the new spirit of "humanism" went forth in every direction, the man gave the first decided impulse to the new movement was not a resident in that city. Francis Petrarch was indeed of Florentine extraction, but his father, a notary of Florence, having been banished at the same time with Dante in 1302, * Comp. Voigt, p. 153. For some, as Strozzi, Palmieri, Castiglionchio, the general index to Tiraboschi's work, forming Vol. XVI. of the Milan edition, may be consulted. There were two persons of the name of Lapo, or Jacopo da Castiglionchio, viz: a contemporary of Petrarch's, Professor of Canon Law at Florence and Padua, to whom the poet was indebted for some Latin manuscripts, and his grandson, who is intended in the text, who translated Dionysius of Halicarnassus, with some of Plutarch's lives, wrote some original works, was a Professor at Bologna of Belles Lettres, and afterwards of Moral Philosophy, and died young. he saw the light at Arezzo in 1304. In the eighth or ninth year of his age, his father, having now lost the hope of being recalled from banishment, went to Avignon, the new seat of the Papacy, and here, or in the neighboring city of Carpentras, the education of Francis was begun. The study of law, first at Montpellier, then at Bologna, next engaged his attention, until his twenty-second year, when he returned to Avignon. Having, it is probable, now lost his parents and his patrimony, he entered so far into the ecclesiastical order as to submit to clerical tonsure, and was thus enabled to hold ecclesiastical benefices, but could not be persuaded to undertake the cure of souls. A few years after his return from the schools of law, he met Laura in the Church of St. Clara, at Avignon. This was in 1327, and she died during the great plague of 1348. Of Laura, it is still disputed whether she was a virgin or a wife, although the probability leans to the first named side. There is no doubt, however, that he loved a real being, with a love not paraded for the sake of others, but kindled by his imagination, and returned. His Italian poetry, which he affected to think lightly of, was the product chiefly of this sentiment.* His attainments as a Latinist kept pace with rhymes in the vulgar style, and his hope of renown in after ages rested chiefly on what he wrote in the ancient language, especially, for a time, on his epic poem entitled Africa. The years between 1327 and 1337 were passed in Avignon, or in traveling. In 1336 he made his first visit to Rome. In the next year, disgusted with the state of things at the Papal court, or feeling himself undervalued there, or desirous, as he himself says, "to mitigate the ardor with which he had been affected for many years," he bought a small estate at Vaucluse, twelve miles from Avignon, where he lived in simplicity and He says of his Italian poems, in Sonnet 252, of part 2, of his Canzoniere:S'io avessi creduto, che si care Fosser le voci de' sospir mie' in rima, In numero piu spesse, in stil piu rare. But he seems to have polished them, as his corrections in original manuscripts show. |