Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [192]
As the power of the barons dwindled, a new class of professionals and entrepreneurs flourished: lawyers, tax advisers, importers and exporters of grain, moneylenders, traders in luxury goods. Many came from Genoa, others from Tuscany, traditional breeding ground of merchants and financiers. Regardless of background, those involved in trade and finance were routinely referred to as ‘Jews’ by the habitually anti-Semitic Neapolitans. The actual Jewish population had been decimated by a systematic campaign of expulsions begun a hundred years before.
The rich dressed in the Spanish manner and travelled through the streets in carriages or covered litters. George Sandys remarked that there were as many litter-bearers touting for work on the streets of Naples as there were boatmen on the busy wharves of London. But the city’s most striking feature was its ubiquitous crowd of beggars and paupers. In every street and in every alley thronged a seething, jostling mass of the poor. ‘Nowhere in the world,’ wrote Capaccio, ‘is there anything so obtrusive and undisciplined, the result of the mixture and confusion of so many races … miserable, beggarly and mercenary folk of a kind such as to undermine the wisest constitution of the best of republics, the dregs of humanity, who have been at the bottom of all the tumult and uprisings in the city and cannot be restrained otherwise than by the gallows.’12 He likened the Neapolitan crowd to a constant swarm of insects. Wherever he went, he heard ‘a murmuring … as if it were the buzzing of bees’.13
Despite the city’s prosperity, there was work for only a fraction of its ever-growing population. Every day, every week, every year, an unstoppable flood of rural migrants poured into its already close-packed mesh of streets. They came to escape the harshness and uncertainty of life on the land, where petty banditry was rife and where the failure of one crop could doom an entire family to starvation. Their plight had been further exacerbated by new and punitive royal taxes, exacted by the Spanish from the rural peasantry, who abandoned their smallholdings in droves.
As its population climbed inexorably, Naples became caught in a vicious circle that made mass unemployment and grim poverty inevitable facts of life there. The authorities lived in continual fear of social unrest, with good reason. There had been brief, bloody rebellions in 1508 and 1547. To avert the threat of revolution, the viceregal government guaranteed food and provisions even in times of scarcity or famine. Grain was stockpiled in vast quantities to ensure that corn and bread would always be available, at state-controlled prices, to all the inhabitants of the city. Such measures had the inevitable effect of attracting yet more immigrants, thus exacerbating the very crisis the government had intended to alleviate.
In a vain attempt to check the city’s growth, the authorities introduced restrictive building ordinances, which prohibited the construction of new dwellings outside the city walls; the intention was to stem the tide of immigrants by the simple expedient of depriving them of anywhere to live. But workers from the countryside continued to flow into Naples, so the new regulations simply meant that living conditions became ever more cramped. It has been estimated that some 21,000 people were squeezed into every square mile of the city.14
Even the physical appearance of the population was transformed by this wrenching demographic shift. Pressure on the food supply meant that for the majority pasta replaced vegetables and fruit as the staple diet. Despite the best efforts of the government, many people lived in a state of permanent semi-starvation. Neapolitans became shorter in height and notably more prone to the illnesses and deformities caused by malnutrition: goitres in the throat, rotten teeth,