The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [28]
A late fifteenth-century view of Venice, the Mediterranean superpower - known as ‘The Most Serene Republic’ - showing the new palace built for her ruler, the Doge. In the background can be seen two of the trading ships on which her fortune was based.
Although the rest of Europe was beginning to share in the boom - manifested in an unprecedented scale of building projects, such as the late Gothic churches of Ulm Minster in Germany and Louth in England with their unusually high spires - it was in Italy that the recovery was most spectacular. This was the era of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena with its admonitory frescoes illustrating the effects of good and bad government.
To the ambassadors from northern Europe, accustomed to their vast tracts of waste land and deserted farms, Italy must have seemed positively overcrowded. The population of Venice topped 100,000, as did that of Naples. Florence and Rome held over 40,000 people, and so did Paris. In Germany few towns had a population of more than 20,000. And Italy dazzled all visitors with its extravagance and elegance. Italian was the lingua franca of fashion.
Europe was already affected by the disappearance of Latin as the universal language, due to the growth of sovereign states and the consequent fostering of local vernacular. Even the Roman Curia was no longer insisting that everything be written and conducted in Latin:
The generation of men shall come to such a pass as not to understand each other’s speech…. Who will understand the different languages? Who will rule the diverse customs? Who will reconcile the English with the French, or join the Genoese to the Aragonese, or conciliate the Germans to the Hungarians and Bohemians?
And as the universities proliferated, it was no longer necessary to go to a foreign country to obtain a higher education.
Amid these burgeoning local achievements, Florence stood out above the rest. One-third of the city’s population worked on the production of fine Florentine wool, selling it all over the Continent as fast as it could be produced. The first income taxes were being levied, and a census of property was to be taken for the first time anywhere in Europe, so that a form of wealth tax could also be raised.
This was the time of the entrepreneur, as new trading opportunities brought new families into positions of power hitherto the prerogative of aristocrats. Florence was republican by the mid-fourteenth century, and the power of the state was growing mightily. The guilds fought the hereditary noble families for political pre-eminence.
Because the northern Europeans were rapidly learning from the Florentine example, the Italian traders moving across the Mediterranean needed state support if they were to fight off this new challenge. In 1393 came the first major imposition of tariffs against foreign cloth in Florence and its markets. That same year it became illegal to carry Florentine goods on non-Florentine ships. Export of gold coin over 50 florins was prohibited.
To manage all the new regulations, more officials were needed. Between 1350 and 1400 the number of bureaucrats in Florence quintupled, as did the number of lawyers, notaries and accountants. Eighteen civil servants were needed to collect one customs toll; fifty-eight commissioners handled contracts with mercenary troops (the Florentines were too busy with trade to do their own fighting). Even the freedom of the Church was curtailed. In the 1380s the Tuscan clergy lost most of their medieval liberties and immunities. The Church started making regular contributions to the communal treasury. Church lands were confiscated. The religious fraternities, once so powerful, were virtually under