The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [29]
Opportunities in the city were so attractive that many landed magnates, powerful in their local country villages, changed their names and became franchised urban commoners. The new virtues were pragmatism and commercial acumen. Pomp and circumstance were left to the old-fashioned northerners, with their absurd antiquated orders of chivalry.
As the climate became more egalitarian, state control grew until it dominated every aspect of life. State officials regulated the value of gifts that could be exchanged at a marriage, the fines for prostitutes found working in unauthorised areas, the price of fish, the premiums due on dowry insurance. With the state’s new financial commitments, the Public Debt grew out of all proportion. The Monte di Pieta, originally set up as a pawnbroking institution in the days when lending money was against the rules of the Church, was now a sophisticated organisation handling the debt, and offering an 8 per cent ‘gift’ to its shareholders.
Florentine power was underpinned by wealth derived from cloth production. Here a fifteenth-century miniature shows a local lady being measured for a dress. The unshaven tailor is a reminder that razors were an expensive commodity at the time.
A local market in Florence. People buy household wares, buttons and cloth, and shoes. Note the customer on the left, reaching into the elaborately decorated purse at his waist. To judge by the fur hats, it is winter.
Between 1345 and 1427 the number of shareholders increased twentyfold. The 1427 property census showed that almost everyone worth more than 5000 florins had a stake in it. Many of them had little choice in the matter. From 1390 on, the state adopted the system of enforced loans. That year they took half a million florins. In 1400 the figure had risen to 1,200,000, and the total of the Public Debt - 8,500,000 florins - was seven and a half times the commercial wealth of the entire city. Every affluent Florentine had a vested interest in the welfare of his community. The days of revolution were over. No ruler invited to command Florence had much time left for radical change after he had finished administering the apparatus of bureaucracy and the massive debt.
Money had become the key. ‘Down with the hypocritical clerics,’ people said, ‘preaching against worldly wealth. Listen to them, and the fabric of society will fall apart.’ The Florentines were shareholders in the first giant corporate state in Western history. In such a state the talented individual had many opportunities to express his skills - within certain limits. Commissions were set up to investigate and if necessary to execute those who acted against ‘the interests of the state’.
The backbone of this new community, half democratic, half totalitarian, was the middle class. And what these new men wanted was social recognition. Since they could not look to their own ancestry for social status, they transferred the source of their pride on to the state itself. Civic pride would give them all the public recognition they needed. Religion was relegated to being a private matter. ‘Man is weak,’ they said. ‘Perfection can only be attained by the community.’ It was the state that would confer nobility on the citizen. The public world conceived in these terms offered attractive possibilities for happiness and virtue that would be denied those who preferred to lead an individualistic, isolated life. Dignity and stability were the new accolades. Labour and wealth were sanctified because of their public value.
Masolino’s painting of St Peter healing the cripple, watched by two strolling members of the new Florentine middle class, dressed in the height of fashion.
These new attitudes were vital to a burgher class that, with the disappearance of the guilds, had lost the protection it had enjoyed during the Middle Ages. Civic values would give recognition to the successful merchant, the serious scholar, the pragmatic man who could handle life as he handled his business. The new politics