Italy

Thereafter Lorenzo pursued a more cautious and successful path in foreign affairs. On the death of Sixtus in 1484, he made a friend of the successor, Innocent VIII, and through this intimacy Lorenzo acquired a cardinalship for his son Giovanni. (And it was Giovanni, as Pope Leo X, who was to ensure the triumph of the Medici throughout Tuscany in the 16th century.) But the claims made for Lorenzo as “the peacemaker” of Italy, even as a “constructor of a balance of power,” have no substance—except insofar as he, as ruler of a militarily weak state in his last years, inevitably took part in a balance of weak states from which only Venice stood out. In addition, Lorenzo—a man of genuine intellectual and aesthetic interests, who had been educated as a humanist rather than as a merchant—can be criticized as a businessman. Even acknowledging that the Medici bank had to meet political as well as strictly economic ends, with loans to political allies who might be poor risks financially, it remains true that it was inadequately supervised and, for this reason, close to failure by 1492.

In the subject territories of the contado, Lorenzo was able to suppress any rebellion. An attempt by Arezzo to free itself from Florentine commercial exploitation in 1471 led to the sack of the town by mercenary troops in Florentine pay (though whether or not this was at Lorenzo’s express will is uncertain). In Florence itself during his predominance, the patriciate pursued a more aristocratic lifestyle, expressed among other ways by a revival of jousting and lavish expenditure on clothes, palaces, and the arts—all of which were at odds with older traditions of republicanism. Yet, in public patronage of the arts, Lorenzo—perhaps because he had less money, perhaps because the family’s houses were already filled with works of art—did less than his father. Lorenzo preferred small, private pieces, as found in his collection of antique cameos, medals, and gems and in the pastiche-antique model statuettes produced for him by Bertoldo di Giovanni. He also had a creative interest in architecture. Lorenzo read Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (promulgated 1452, published 1485; Ten Books on Architecture), wrote to the duke of Urbino asking to see the plans of his new palace, and entered his own design in the competition for a new facade of the Florence cathedral. Only his death (in April 1492) at the age of 43 saved the judges from what might have been a particularly difficult decision. Milan

Sant'Ambrogio BasilicaSant'Ambrogio Basilica, Milan.© Claudio Baldini/Shutterstock.com

Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.iStockphoto/ThinkstockWithin the duchy of Milan, meanwhile, the Sforza family sought to maintain its newly acquired power. Francesco (duke 1450–66) provided his subjects not only relative peace and patronage of humanism and the arts but also the disadvantages of tyrannical rule. His successor, the cruel and lustful Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466–76), was assassinated in a conspiracy of three young men who combined personal grievances and republican sentiments. His son and heir, Gian Galeazzo, was a minor. In 1480 the regency government came under the control of Galeazzo’s brother, Ludovico Sforza (“il Moro”), who ruled as duke from 1494 to 1499. Ludovico maintained the customary splendour of the Milanese court and employed, among many other artists and engineers, Leonardo da Vinci (who painted for him the Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie) and Donato Bramante (architectural work at Sant’Ambrogio and Santa Maria delle Grazie). Yet under his rule, extravagant taxation, imposed largely to meet the cost of a virtually standing army, threatened the prosperity of the duchy, which derived from agricultural wealth, silk, and arms manufacture.

From 1463 to 1499 Milan also ruled Genoa. Bitter factional conflicts had, from the mid-14th century, eliminated Genoa as a political force and driven it to dependence on other powers. Yet, despite the advance of the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean, which threatened its colonies (Chios, Samos, and Lesbos in the Aegean; Kaffa in Crimea; and Tana at the head of the Sea of Azov), Genoa’s economy still prospered. With the support of the Bank of San Giorgio, which served as a state treasury, the city moved toward its 16th-century eminence as one of the great European financial centres. Genoese émigrés (such as, notably, Christopher and Bartholomew Columbus), discouraged now from business in the East, looked to new fields of enterprise in the Iberian Peninsula. By 1492 the city’s bankers were dominant in Spain, particularly in Sevilla (Seville), and had already financed a considerable part of the exploration and colonization of the Canary Islands. The first French invasion

Because the rulers of both France and Spain had dynastic claims in Italy, it was predictable that after the Hundred Years’ War in France in 1453 and the conquest of Granada by Spain in 1492 both powers would make Italy the battlefield of their conflicting ambitions. In the event, it was an Italian who called the foreigners into Italy. Prince (later King) Ferdinand of Naples, angry that his grandson-in-law, Gian Galeazzo, duke of Milan, was excluded from power, threatened the regent, Ludovico. In reply, Ludovico successfully urged King Charles VIII of France to vindicate the claims of the French royal house to Naples. Charles’s response was at first stunningly effective. He crossed the Alps in early September 1494 and marched south. At Florence, Lorenzo’s successor, his son Piero de’ Medici, had declared in favour of Ferdinand. But the rapid advance of the French forces demoralized him, and he sued for peace in November. Discredited by this failure, Piero was forced to flee from the anger of his fellow Florentines. Charles entered Rome on the last day of the year and Naples—which he conquered “with the chalk of his billeting officers”—on Feb. 22, 1495. Yet his triumph was short-lived. Alarmed at this sudden increase in French strength, Ludovico, the emperor Maximilian I, the pope, and King Ferdinand II of Aragon came together in the League of Venice in March 1495 to combat Charles’s power. Faced by these forces, Charles, leaving behind some of his troops in garrison, decided to return home. Crossing the Apennines at Cisa Pass, he met the army of the league blocking his passage at Fornovo. After an indecisive battle, the French army broke through into Lombardy and passed back to France.

Three years later, when Charles died, his campaign may have seemed merely a passing incident of no importance. Yet by making Italy a battleground for foreign powers he had profoundly weakened the peninsular states, which now faced a series of invasions that subjected them to domination by “barbarians” (as the Italians were pleased now to call non-Italians). Florence, humiliated by defeat and weakened by the establishment of a new government, struggled to regain control of towns that had seized the occasion to throw off subjection. Naples, devasted by war, fell largely into the hands of Spanish troops. In Milan Ludovico now feared both domestic unpopularity and the accession to the French throne of Louis XII, who claimed to be heir to the Visconti. Venice, characteristically emerging with spoils from the imbroglio (the Neapolitan ports of Otranto, Brindisi, and Trani), was looking for new triumphs, while Pope Alexander VI was considering means to disrupt the peace of Italy on behalf of his son Cesare Borgia. Savonarola

The French invasion and defeat and the exile of the Medici gave particular prominence within the new republican regime of Florence to a friar, Girolamo Savonarola. The son of a prominent physician, Savonarola had been born at Ferrara, entered the Dominican order at Bologna at the age of 23, and rapidly acquired fame as a theologian and preacher. In the years 1482–85 he served in the convent of San Marco at Florence; he returned there at the express wish of Lorenzo de’ Medici and became prior in 1491. In those years Savonarola preached conventional apocalyptic sermons warning of God’s punishments that awaited Florentine sinners, including, notably, those guilty of evil in government.

Following the passage of Charles VIII’s army, this message took on new forms. Drawing upon earlier Florentine mystical traditions, Savonarola now preached the doctrine that, in return for moral purification, Florence would soon become “the new Rome,” enjoying power, dominion, and success in this world. This flattering teaching, which was especially appealing after Florence’s humiliation, brought a wide circle of personal adherents (the Piagnoni, or “Wailers,” as their opponents called them), who enthusiastically backed Savonarola’s campaigns (not in themselves untypical of revivalist movements of the age) against gambling, blasphemy, and illicit sex. From 1497 Savonarola organized bands of young men to go from house to house to persuade their inhabitants to surrender those worldly possessions to which they were particularly attached, such as dice, books, paintings, and elegant dresses. Savonarola’s followers then placed these “vanities” on a bonfire and solemnly dedicated their destruction to the Lord.

In the controversy of 1495 as to what form of government should replace that of the Medici, Savonarola supported the party seeking the widest extension of popular participation. It is unlikely that Savonarola had any decisive influence on the political fortunes of the city; nonetheless, he came to be associated with the many failures of the government in those years and to be seen as an enemy by the parties of the Bigi (looking for the return of the Medici), the Arrabbiati (who hoped for a much more exclusive, less broadly based, republican government), and the Compagnacci (those who resented the puritanical way of life now imposed on the city). In particular, he attracted enemies through his unflinching support for an alliance with France, which isolated the commune in Italy but brought no response in loyalty from Charles VIII. His foreign-policy stance and his evangelical denunciation of the wickedness of the papacy aroused the hostility of Pope Alexander VI. In June 1497 the friar was excommunicated and commanded to remain silent. Defying this decree, Savonarola resumed preaching early in 1498 and included in his sermons appeals for a general council to reform the church. Such defiance, combined with a certain revulsion against the unrelenting moral crusade, led the secular government in April 1498 to turn against Savonarola. He was accused of heresy, tortured, and finally hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria (May 23).

Yet the contrast between the austerity of Savonarola’s life and the licentiousness of the Borgia pope who condemned him, as well as the destiny that the friar had prophesied for the Florentines, lingered in the minds of many, including some of the city’s most distinguished citizens, and in the last Florentine republic, of 1527–30, the memory of his exalted prophecies was still to sustain those who resisted the Medici and the emperor Charles V. The early Italian Renaissance

Against this political and economic background stands the cultural development of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. The term Italian Renaissance has not gone unchallenged; its meaning and boundaries have aroused much controversy. From the 1340s the idea of “rebirth” was a commonplace in critical writing. Authors spoke of how, with Dante and Giotto, both poetry and painting had been “reborn,” and in the following two centuries the same notion was often applied to other areas such as architecture, sculpture, and philosophy. In this period, “rebirth” was always used in connection with some intellectual or artistic skill; it was not until the 19th century that historians such as the French Jules Michelet and then, above all, the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt (whose The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy was first published in German at Basel, Switz., in 1860) began to write of the Renaissance as a period of time.

For Burckhardt this period consisted, broadly speaking, of the 15th century in Italy, a time and place in which “medieval” man became “modern” man. For him, the Italian of the 15th century was “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe.” No historian today would hold to that definition. Nonetheless, the term, redefined, still enjoys overwhelming assent. For some historians (such as Lauro Martines), the Renaissance coincides with the life of the commune, stretching back to the 11th century; for others (such as Hans Baron), it sprang from the ideological battles that accompanied the wars of Florence and Milan at the beginning of the 15th century. A majority consensus, however, still conceives of the Italian Renaissance as a period of cultural history having no very sharp chronological boundaries but stretching over the years from about 1340 to about 1550. Humanism

The early Renaissance had two principal characteristics. Of these the first is humanism, a term that did not carry the present-day ethical or antireligious sense but instead referred to the intensive study of a revived Classical antiquity. Humanism comprised an intense concern with the studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity”)—that is, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy as read in Classical Latin and, sometimes, Greek texts. As such, it represented not a philosophical system but rather an educational program that largely excluded those subjects taught in the universities: logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, law, and theology.

The origins of humanism date back to the Italy of the 1290s, in which one finds, in many cities, friends coming together informally to study the ancient world and attempting to reproduce something of the spirit of the Latin classics in their own writings. That the movement should have originated in Italy is not surprising. It was natural that Italians should look back to Rome, particularly since the ruins of Roman civilization still stood about them. In addition, the study of the great corpus of Roman law in the universities of Padua and Bologna led easily to a wish to understand the society that had produced it. Yet even beyond that, in the secular world of the city-states, where lay literates rather than clerics dominated intellectual life, the secular civilization of the Classical world had an irresistible appeal. It was not that the humanists were un-Christian, rather that their Christianity was a lay and, in some sense, secularized Christianity.

The movement advanced in the middle of the 14th century through the work of two men, eminent both as humanists and for their roles in Italian and European literature: Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch; 1304–74) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75). It was consolidated at the end of the century, above all in Florence. Here in the 1390s the inspired teaching of the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras made the city the leading centre for the study of Classical Greek in Europe, while Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), both of whom served for some time as chancellors of the republic, claimed that the disciplines of humanism were particularly suitable for the service of the state as studies appropriate to the “active life” of a republican citizen.

Thenceforth humanism dominated intellectual life in the peninsula (and later in much of Europe), influencing vernacular literature, the writing of history, art, education, and style of life. During the 15th century, for the first time, Florentine Greek studies turned scholars from moral back to metaphysical philosophy. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) translated all of Plato’s writings, together with important Neoplatonic texts and the Greek mystical Corpus Hermeticum. From these sources he went on to develop his own philosophy of Christian Hermeticism, or Neoplatonism. Subsequently modified and developed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), whose best-known essay bears the significant title Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486; Oration on the Dignity of Man), this philosophy, which argued that human beings could independently determine their own salvation by following the natural impulses of love and beauty, presented an immensely optimistic view of humanity and its place in the universe. It was to exercise a strong fascination, particularly over artists and poets, in the following hundred years. The arts and intellectual life

Humanism does not by itself comprise the whole of the early Italian Renaissance, which should also be understood as a general intense efflorescence of all the arts and intellectual life. From the time of Dante and Giotto through that of the great trio of Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Masaccio at the beginning of the 15th century and on to the age of the High Renaissance, these years present a picture of extraordinary cultural power. In examining its social origins, it has been traditional to point to the economic wealth and early capitalist development of central and northern Italy. Certainly, that development allowed the financing of patronage, advanced literacy, and in many ways offered a new way of looking at the world. Yet high culture developed unevenly throughout the peninsula; for instance, in this period it was insignificant in the great port and thriving economic centre of Genoa. Therefore, wealth did not simply equate with cultural vitality.

Lantern on top of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) of Florence, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1436; completed c. 1436–71.Robert Harding Picture Library

It was, in fact, strong states (unlike Genoa) and the peculiar state system of Italy that lay behind most of the intense secular patronage and intellectual life in this period. In painting, sculpture, and architecture the leading patrons were governments, and the patrons’ motives were a mixture of aesthetic response, civic pride, and propaganda. The communes took responsibility not only for the palazzi comunali, or city halls, and other communal buildings but also for the building, interior furbishing, and maintenance of their cathedrals and other principal churches (in these, sometimes specifically excluding any ecclesiastical participation in the work). In the same spirit, republics and signorie engaged in town planning—in the destruction and reconstruction of town sites, in regulating building and use, and, through appointed conciliar committees, in the siting of new roads, squares, and fountains. At the same time, government involvement in the arts gave them an increasingly secular character. Political allegories and demands for identifiable portraits of lords or statesmen made new demands upon the artist and stimulated interest in the art of Classical Rome, whose heir the communes claimed to be.

The Palazzo Ducale, 1450–1510; in Pesaro, Italy.Shostal/Superstock

Whether in the republics or the signorie, art had a major role as propaganda. Because Italy was divided into many states, political art was not centred at one court—as in England, Scotland, or France—but flourished in city-states throughout the peninsula. Because the states were in intense rivalry, art itself was enlisted in that rivalry. Thus, the fragmentation of Italy, which made it so vulnerable to foreigners in the last years of the 15th century, also contributed to its cultural supremacy. At the same time, the papacy played its own part in this development—particularly from the mid-15th century, when Pope Nicholas V made the first full-scale alliance between the papacy and humanism, planning “majestic buildings, combining taste and beauty” for Rome, to exalt the majesty of the Holy See. John Larner John Foot Early modern Italy (16th to 18th centuries) From the 1490s through the 17th-century crisis

The calamitous wars that convulsed the Italian peninsula for some four decades after the French invasion of 1494 were not, according to modern historians, the tragic aftermath of a lost world. Rather, they were a further elaboration and intensification of a violent age whose self-definition was transition. War reflected the wider European rivalries that made Italy a prize for plunder and a defensive bulwark against the Ottoman Turks, that led to the explorations and conquests of the New World and to new contacts with Asia, and that erupted into open divisions over religious belief. Above all, war propelled all of Europe into a new economic and demographic expansion that was to shift the centre of power from the garden of Italy in the Mediterranean to northwestern Europe and its Atlantic world. French and Spanish rivalries after 1494

The new political landscape after the 1494 invasion still reflected the contradictions and conflicts of the medieval political past. Rivalries of status, class, family, and neighbourhood continued unabated in the cities of both republics and principalities. Territorial states grew, and their urban capitals dominated neighbouring rural hinterlands even more than in previous decades. And, although independent action by the Italian states now had to yield to powerful initiatives from the newly unified monarchies of France and Spain, such foreign intervention echoed the policies of their medieval Angevin and Aragonese forebears. French loss of Naples, gain of Milan

The French were not expelled from Naples. Charles VIII left Naples as freely in May 1495 as he had entered it a few months earlier. But an anti-French league led by Venetian and Spanish troops was needed to recover the kingdom for Ferdinand II of Naples (ruled 1495–96). When Spanish naval action cut the supply lines of the embattled French garrisons that had been left behind, a preliminary armistice in 1497 ended the fighting.

The Italian states took advantage of the disequilibrium caused by the invasions for their own territorial aggrandizement. Venice, already more powerful than any of the other Italian states, gained the most. It occupied several important ports in Puglia with the intent of appropriating them, backed Pisa in its long though ultimately unsuccessful revolt against Florence (ending in 1509), and supported the conquest of Milan in 1499 by Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515), the new king of France, in exchange for Cremona and its hinterland. Spanish acquisition of Naples

Louis XII had not given up French pretensions to the Kingdom of Naples, and the acquisition of Milan strengthened his supply position. Powerful aristocrats within the kingdom, led by the pro-French princes of Sanseverino in Calabria, fomented dissension and weakened the already tenuous rule of King Frederick (1496–1501) to the point that both the French and Spanish saw an opportunity to satisfy their ambitions. In the Treaty of Granada (1500) they agreed to invade and partition the kingdom between them into a northern French sphere of the Abruzzi and Campania (including the city of Naples) and a southern Spanish sphere of Calabria and Puglia. Yet the most wily diplomat of the age, Ferdinand II (the Catholic) of Aragon, the king of Spain, hoped not only to forestall French ascendancy and outsmart Louis XII in Italy but also to assert his own claims as the legitimate heir to the Aragonese empire founded by Alfonso V (the Magnanimous) in 1442. In addition, he hoped to resist Ottoman advances that were threatening his possession of Sicily. In 1501 a French and Spanish invasion divided the Kingdom of Naples according to plan, and Frederick of Naples lived out his life in French exile together with his faithful servant, the great Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazzaro. When hostilities broke out in Puglia in 1503 over the large revenues of the sheep customhouse at Foggia, Spanish forces under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (the “Great Captain”) outfought the French and occupied the entire Kingdom of Naples by the end of that year. France abandoned its claim to Naples in 1505. During the next 30 years Naples spearheaded Spanish policy in Italy. Tuscany and the papacy

During the first decade after the French invasions, Tuscany, the Romagna, and the Marche also underwent political upheavals. The Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, and Savonarola’s powerful sermons inspired a theocratic state. Tuscan cities that the French had liberated from Florentine rule continued their revolt. After Savonarola’s execution in 1498, an oligarchic republic was created under the authority of Piero di Tommaso Soderini (ruled 1498–1512; elected gonfaloniere for life in 1502).

Meanwhile, Cesare Borgia, the natural son of Pope Alexander VI, attempted to carve out a dynastic state for himself in the Romagna and the Marche. As the model for political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli’s prince, Cesare Borgia had prepared assiduously to seize power upon his father’s death. But his plans were thwarted by bad fortune: at the very moment when decisive action was required, he himself was deathly ill. A college of cardinals caught between Spanish and French interests hastily elected a new pope, Pius III, who, however, died only 26 days later. His successor, Julius II (reigned 1503–13), had to win back by force of arms the territories in east-central Italy up to Bologna that Cesare Borgia had taken from the Papal States.

Borgia, CesareCesare Borgia, oil painting; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Alinari/Art Resource, New York French victories in Lombardy

In order to reconquer the lost papal lands, Julius II organized an anti-Venetian alliance, the League of Cambrai (1508). All the great powers of Italy, along with those across the Alps—the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Spain—joined forces to defeat the Venetians at Agnadello (May 14, 1509). But dissension among the victorious allies, who were manipulated by skillful Venetian diplomacy, turned the alliance against France, because that kingdom now seemed to be the greatest power in Italy. A Holy League, organized in 1511 to curtail French power in Lombardy, restored the Medici in Florence in 1512 with the help of Spanish arms and allowed Venice to keep its old terra ferma (mainland) empire (without its recent acquisitions in Lombardy, the Romagna, and Puglia). Nonetheless, Agnadello profoundly shook Venetian self-confidence and remained the turning point in the republic’s imperial ambitions in mainland Italy.

At the same time, Louis XII enjoyed his greatest triumphs, including the defeat of Julius II’s Holy League at Ravenna (April 11, 1512). But, with the death of his brilliant general Gaston de Foix in that battle, the French suffered an irreparable loss. Further, in May 1512, 20,000 Swiss troops entered Italy on the papal side, and the French army was recalled to repel invasions of Navarre (Navarra) by the Spanish and of Normandy and Guyenne by the English. Francis I (ruled 1515–47), who succeeded his cousin and father-in-law, Louis XII, reopened hostilities in Italy. His army of 40,000 men defeated the Swiss at Marignano (Sept. 13–14, 1515), which allowed him to retake Milan. The new pope, Leo X (reigned 1513–21), who was a Medici and a dependent of Spain, hurried to secure peace. Within the year, the new king of Spain, Charles I (ruled 1516–56), who had succeeded his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand II, as coruler because of his mother’s insanity, signed the Peace of Noyon (Aug. 13, 1516), which gave Milan to France and confirmed Naples for Spain. The peace would not endure, however, as local Italian affairs became subordinated to the dynastic struggle between the young heirs to Habsburg and Valois (the ruling French dynasty) fortunes and to the Reformation movement that intertwined religion and politics into the 17th century. The age of Charles V

Charles I, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, aspired to universal monarchy over the far-flung territories he had inherited, from Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to the New World. The Piedmontese humanist Mercurino de Gattinara, Charles’s chancellor from 1518 to 1530, fueled his ambitions, but the providential design for Charles to be a new Charlemagne collided with political realities. The revolt of the comuneros (1520–21), an uprising of a group of Spanish cities, was successfully quelled, securing Castile as the bedrock of his empire, but the opposition of Francis I of France, of Süleyman I (the Magnificent; ruled 1520–66) of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Lutheran princes in Germany proved more intractable.

Early success in Italy, nevertheless, provided Charles with the most important base outside Spain for exercising his power. Imperial troops forced the French to retreat from Milan and restored the Sforza in 1522. When a refitted French army of 30,000 men retook Milan in 1524, the new Medici pope, Clement VII (reigned 1523–34), changed sides to become a French ally. But, at the most important battle of the Italian wars, fought at Pavia on Feb. 24, 1525, the French were defeated and Francis I was captured. Soon after his release, he abrogated the Treaty of Madrid (January 1526), in which he had been forced, among other concessions, to abandon his Italian claims. He headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice. With no French forces in the field, some 12,000 of Charles’s imperial troops, largely unpaid Lutheran infantry, marched south to Rome. On May 6, 1527, they attacked and sacked the city, forcing the pope to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The repercussions of this chastisement of the corrupt church were heard throughout Europe, and some scholars still date the end of the Renaissance in Italy to this event. New warfare

New military technologies in siegecraft (cannon and bastion) and new techniques in open-field engagements (mixing pike and harquebus) not only transformed the nature of warfare but also threatened the order of a society still dominated by an aristocratic military caste. In the course of the Italian wars, the non-noble infantry adopted tactical innovations that unseated the cavalry of heavily armoured nobility, which had dominated medieval warfare. Charles VIII’s invading army employed the Swiss pike phalanx, whose moving squares of 6,000 men had already developed the ability to engage in offensive as well as defensive maneuvers. In the fighting against France for the Kingdom of Naples, Fernández de Córdoba first developed the Spanish tercios, more-flexible units of 3,000 infantrymen using both pikes and harquebuses. Spanish military superiority eventually owed its success to the introduction in 1521 of the musket (an improved harquebus) and to the refinement of pike and musket tactics in the years preceding the Battle of Pavia. Such tactics dominated land warfare until the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.

The new social composition of the enlarged infantry, as well as the need for large quantities of metal and the financial requirements for equipping and launching an army, pushed military affairs further into royal hands, strengthening the growing power of the central monarchy at the expense of the aristocracy. Commoners could forge a new relationship directly with royal authority. They could also, as in the case of the republics, create new images of citizenly power. In 1503 the Florentine republic, for example, planned two monumental mural paintings for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio (town hall) to be executed by two of the giants of High Renaissance art, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The former’s Battle of Anghiari and the latter’s Battle of Cascina, if completed, would have emphasized the strength and righteous rage of republican virtue and the necessity for citizens to be vigilant, challenging them to retake Pisa and subdue Tuscany during the republic’s ongoing wars. Ludovico Ariosto, singing his epic poetry at the chivalric pro-French court of Ferrara, lamented the loss of glory, honour, valour, and courage to the “wretched and foul invention” of firearms. Even 20 years after the fact, when the diplomat and writer Baldassare Castiglione nostalgically portrayed the graceful court of Urbino of 1508 in The Courtier (1528), he did so in order to instruct courtiers and court ladies on how to adapt their roles to the changing times.

Delphic Sibyl, fresco by Michelangelo, 1508–12; in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.Scala/Art Resource, New York Spanish victory in Italy

In the immediate wake of the sack of Rome and the consequent disgrace of the Medici papacy, the Florentines expelled their Medici overlords. A French army under General Odet de Foix Lautrec finally arrived in 1528, but Andrea Doria, a Genoese admiral and aristocrat whose galleys had formerly been in the service of the French, unexpectedly switched sides and became a staunch supporter of Charles V. Plague took Lautrec’s life and decimated the French army, and in 1529 the pope was forced to make peace with Charles in the Treaty of Barcelona—as did Francis I in the Treaty of Cambrai. After almost 40 years of war, Italy submitted to Spanish pacification. Francis I renounced his claims in Italy, as well as in Artois and Flanders. The last Sforza was restored in Milan with the provision that the duchy would pass to Spain upon his death. Venice lost its recent mainland conquests. The Papal States were restored, and in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V emperor and king of Italy and made vague promises to call a council to address the Protestant schism and reform the church. In exchange, Spanish forces reinstated the Medici in Florence.

Italy remained subject to sporadic French incursions into Savoy in 1536–38 and 1542–44 during a third and fourth Habsburg-Valois war, and Spain’s Italian possessions were increasingly taxed to support Charles’s continual campaigns; however, for the remainder of his reign, Charles’s armies fought the French, the Ottomans, and the Protestant princes outside Italy. Notable for Italy was Charles V’s capture of Tunis in 1535 and his glorious march up the Italian peninsula in 1536 to confirm his personal rule. But the Ottomans formally allied themselves with France against the Habsburgs thereafter, defeated an allied fleet at Prevesa, retook Tunis in 1538, and stepped up their assault on the Venetian empire in the Mediterranean. With the eventual failure of Charles’s attempts to secure Germany, his great continental empire was divided. Italy became a part of the Spanish Habsburg inheritance of his son, Philip II (ruled 1556–98), and, after the Spanish victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) officially confirmed the era of Spanish domination that had existed in Italy since 1530. Spanish Italy

Spain thus established complete hegemony over all the Italian states except Venice, which alone maintained its independence. Several Italian states were ruled directly, while others remained Spanish dependents. Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia (which had all been dependencies of Aragon), as well as Milan, came under direct Spanish rule and owed their allegiance to the sovereign according to their own laws and traditions. Their foreign policy interests were subordinated to the imperial designs of Spain, which also appointed their chief officers (viceroys in Naples, Palermo, and Cagliari; a governor in Milan) and administered their internal affairs through local councils. From the beginning of Philip II’s reign, Italian affairs, which had originally been administered by the Council of Aragon, were coordinated by a Council of Italy in Madrid. At this council, the three major states—Naples, Sicily, and Milan—were each represented by two regents, one Castilian and one native. Sardinia remained a dependency of Aragon. The king, however, continued to receive and be responsive to embassies sent by various groups outside official channels until the Spanish Habsburg line died out in 1700.

A vitriolic anti-Spanish polemic has long dominated the historiography of early modern Italy. It accuses Spanish rule of an authoritarianism closed to new ideas and innovation, of presiding over an empty formalism in literary expression, and of promoting spagnolismo, an exaggerated and ostentatious pomp—all perceived as the fruits of a decadent, backward-looking colonial domination. Faulting Spain for trying to integrate Italy within its absolutist and imperial program or blaming Italy’s 17th-century decline on Spanish social and economic policies has served nationalistic fervour since the 16th century, but it has missed both the benefits of Spanish rule to Italian peace and security and the main causes of crisis in 17th-century Italy. To understand the latter, one must examine the internal conflicts and economic impediments that existed within the Italian states themselves rather than look to an absentee Spanish scapegoat. And, above all, early modern Italy must be understood in a wider European context and in relation to the economic shifts wrought by the new Asian and American trade. The touchstone for modern scholarship is Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), which continues to inspire and challenge research into Philip II’s empire and beyond. The Kingdom of Naples

Pedro de Toledo (viceroy 1532–53) reorganized the Kingdom of Naples and placed it firmly within the Spanish monarchical orbit dominated by Castile. Within the kingdom, he oversaw the eradication of the pro-French barons and attempted to install centralized, absolutist policies. Within the city, he developed new residential quarters and strengthened Spanish defenses against outside attack. He enjoyed unparalleled personal prestige; his daughter Eleonora was married to Cosimo I (the Great), the Medici duke of Tuscany, in 1539. But his power had limits, as was shown by the successful Neapolitan opposition to the introduction of the Inquisition in 1547. Pedro’s policy was governed by the principle of “divide and conquer,” which played upon rampant inequalities between the barons and the people and between the capital and the countryside.

The most important ruling body in the kingdom was the Collateral Council, comprising five regents presided over by the viceroy, with a judicial council and a financial council exercising their respective competencies at its side. A new elite of lawyers, a “nobility of the robe,” began to emerge, sustaining the Spanish regime with its indispensable bureaucratic services. The Neapolitan parliament, which consisted of representatives of the city districts (seggi), of the feudal nobility, and of royally owned towns, had only two functions—to authorize taxes and to request rights and privileges from the king in exchange—but this body was suspended in 1642.

In the capital the town council, which seated representatives of the city’s five noble seggi and of a citywide commoners’ seggio, emerged as the most important institution of municipal government. The most pressing problem facing the city administration was the provision of food. Naples had grown to 250,000 inhabitants by 1600, which ranked it first in population among the cities of western Europe.

In the countryside, where some 90 percent of the population still lived, the aristocracy retained strong social and economic control. The Spanish government’s bureaucracy did attempt to break the barons’ political stronghold and to limit the worst abuses, but success depended upon a healthy economy and an emerging middle class, both of which began to falter after 1585. The 12 provinces of the kingdom remained atomized, and their unarticulated markets were often attached to the trading networks of foreign states such as Venice or Genoa rather than integrated to form a national market within the kingdom itself. The kingdom of Sicily

Sicily’s administration had existed apart from that of the mainland since 1282, when the island had revolted against Angevin rule and come under the Aragonese crown. In the 16th century Sicily remained the cornerstone of the Spanish Mediterranean policy against the Ottomans, and its agricultural products continued to be the staple of long-distance trade.

As in Naples, Spanish policy in Sicily attempted to modify traditional baronial abuses. Spain allowed the barons considerable autonomy over their large agrarian estates, including the exploitation of their tenant farmers, but it prevented open feuds between barons and eroded their political power by excluding them from offices in the central government. Two local councils, one in judicial affairs and the other in public finance and administration, centralized Spanish government from the reign of Charles V. Parliament and the Inquisition competed for power with the viceroy. Parliament, which comprised three branches—clergy, nobility, and royal towns and districts—voted ordinary and special taxes, but its short and infrequent sessions prevented sustained opposition to Spanish policies. The Inquisition, on the other hand, was completely independent of the viceroy and often challenged his jurisdiction, but it received royal backing only in purely religious disputes. Above all, Spain played internal rivalries and sectional interests against one another for its own advantage. Constant struggles weakened all parties, and the numerous autonomous authorities held civil government in such check that it became immobilized and unable to make important decisions. Sardinia

Sardinia’s links to the kingdom of Aragon dated from the 14th century. Long-standing assimilation to Spanish culture had reinforced the patriarchal structure of the local nobility, whose chief source of wealth was sheep raising. As in Naples and Sicily, the Spanish introduced little change into government, preferring instead to support an aristocratic-monarchist regime. The viceroy was often a Sardinian, the native parliament had three branches, and international politics separated Sardinia from Italian affairs. The duchy of Milan

When Francesco II Sforza died childless in 1535, Milan devolved to Charles V and was administered by a Spanish governor, who maintained traditional institutions. The duchy consisted of nine provinces, each dominated by a small group of families resident in their provincial capitals. Central administration from Milan rested primarily with the Senate, a judicial and legislative body that maintained its authority under Spanish rule despite inevitable confrontations with the governor. Official Spanish policy aimed at maintaining an equilibrium between centralization and home rule.

Two institutional changes, nevertheless, had significant effects upon the society of Milanese Lombardy. First, by 1584 the membership of the Senate was reduced from 28 to 15 as well as altered in its composition; whereas half of its members had been aristocratic landowners and high-ranking clerics, they now were all professional lawyers. As in Naples, the nobility of the robe, who in Milan were lawyers drawn from the urban patriciate, grew at the expense of the old landed nobility and formed an essential alliance with the Spanish crown. Second, tax reforms aimed at marshaling Milanese resources for the Spanish wars affected the society of the duchy, not only in equalizing the tax burden but also in redistributing power between city and countryside. Merchants, who had previously been tax-exempt, found their wealth (based on annual gross sales) taxed after 1594, and landowners not residing in cities, who had previously been taxed far above city dwellers, benefited from a new assessment system set by elected bodies of rural residents after 1561. These policies had unexpected long-term effects in the 17th century when economic interests were able to regroup and find a foothold in the countryside.

Milan’s strategic importance as the gateway to Italy remained a keystone of Spain’s imperial design, and, with war and revolt north of the Alps, Milan served as a critical staging area for men and supplies on the “Spanish road” from Genoa to Lombardy and from there through the Alpine passes to the Rhineland. During the Revolt of the Netherlands (1567), the Netherlands’ Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) for independence, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Milan was a focal point of Spanish military preparation.

The Roman Catholic Church had unusual influence and autonomy in Milan. Charles Cardinal Borromeo, member of a rich noble family of Milan and nephew of Pope Pius IV (reigned 1559–65), resided in his diocese after 1565 as the model bishop of the Catholic Reformation. He instituted seminaries, diocesan synods, and provincial councils, personally visited some 800 parishes, watched over the spiritual needs of monasteries, convents, and lay confraternities, fought heresy, and supported relief of the poor. Moreover, under his rule the Milanese church enjoyed unusual freedom of action and special privileges in furthering Catholic reform. Principates and oligarchic republics

Spanish hegemony in Italy extended beyond the states under its direct control. The rulers of Savoy and Tuscany owed their titles to Spain, Genoa acted as Spain’s chief banker, the papacy depended heavily on the Spanish monarchy in the age of the Counter-Reformation, and even independent Venice needed Spanish aid in protecting its Mediterranean empire from further erosion by the Turks. Several minor states were so small that they had little political influence; these included the republic of Lucca as well as several duchies that remained under the control of local noble families—the duchies of Modena, Reggio, and Ferrara under the Este family; the duchy of Mantua and Montferrat under the Gonzagas, and the duchy of Parma and Piacenza under the Farnese. These states, too, enjoyed the enforced Spanish peace within Italy and benefited from the security against foreign invasion. Their nobility intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy and absorbed Spanish culture. The duchy of Savoy

During the Italian wars, France and Spain had occupied Savoy, a duchy that incorporated most of the present-day Piedmont, between France and the duchy of Milan. Allied with the victorious Spanish at the battle of St. Quentin (1557), its legitimate heir, Duke Emmanuel Philibert (ruled 1559–80), recovered his state with the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and began to rebuild and strengthen it. He transfered the capital across the Alps from Chambéry to Turin, which grew as a fortified and planned city. He limited the power of numerous localities and centralized state finances. Increased taxes and economic recovery allowed him to maintain a small but disciplined standing army, which became the basis of Piedmontese military power. His son Charles Emmanuel I (ruled 1580–1630) followed an expansionist policy with varying success. In 1589 he failed to take Geneva, and in 1601 he ceded some territory to France in exchange for the marquessate of Saluzzo. He also engaged in debilitating wars in an unsuccessful quest to take Montferrat. The duchy of Tuscany

When Spanish arms restored the Medici to Florence in 1530, they bestowed on them the title “dukes of Tuscany.” After the assassination of the first duke, Alessandro, in 1537, Cosimo I (ruled 1537–74) succeeded him and developed a strong absolutist state. As a Spanish ally, Cosimo fought Siena (1552–55) and annexed it in 1557. The Spanish, however, retained five strategically important seaports, the Stato dei Presidi (“State of the Garrisons”), which were administered by Spanish Naples.

In 1569 Cosimo received the title grand duke of Tuscany. His sons Francis I (ruled 1574–87) and Ferdinand I (ruled 1587–1609) succeeded him, and the latter enlarged the free port of Livorno. In the early modern period the city of Florence had only about one-half of its medieval population, and it receded from the international scene, becoming the capital of a provincial court. The republic of Genoa

In 1528 Andrea Doria initiated a constitutional reform by which nobles loyal to him gained power. Factionalism continued, however, especially between the “old” and “new” nobility. When serious disorders erupted in 1575, the old nobility abandoned the city, and a popular faction took their place beside the new nobility. A compromise mediated by Spain and the papacy averted civil war by reconstituting the ruling class. Wealth replaced status as the basis of social stratification and political alliance.

Andrea Doria’s support of Charles V bolstered Spain’s naval profile in the western Mediterranean. Genoa continued its control over Corsica through its central bank, the Bank of San Giorgio. Genoese bankers, who had extended their family businesses from Naples to Sevilla, replaced the German Fuggers as the primary financiers of the Spanish empire. At home, nobles invested in landed property and city residences, while silk manufacturing employed a large percentage of the Genoese working class. The Republic of Venice

Defeat at Agnadello in 1509, followed by pressure from the Spanish Habsburgs in Lombardy and the Austrian Habsburgs to the north of the republic, limited Venice’s Italian mainland empire. In addition, Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean disrupted Venice’s trade in the Levant and chipped away at its overseas empire: lost were important ports of call in Albania and Greece in 1503, the Aegean islands north of Crete in 1540, Cyprus in 1571, and Crete itself in 1669. At the same time, Portuguese trade with Asia after 1498 and the rise of the Dutch city of Antwerp as an entrepôt for the distribution of goods to northern Europe seriously challenged Venice’s trading monopoly. No longer the most powerful state in Italy, Venice still enjoyed internal cohesion, an extremely effective diplomatic corps, and a strong fleet to navigate an independent policy between Spain and the papacy.

Before the plague of 1576, Venice’s population had risen to 180,000, with a patriciate of under 5 percent. A strong oligarchic tendency during the 16th century reinforced the power of the Council of Ten over the Senate, and the cleavage between rich and poor nobles widened. After 1583, however, the old nobility lost its bid to monopolize politics, and the Senate recovered power, which it applied to a more independent foreign policy. Textile manufacturing remained the most important trade until the precipitous decline of the woolen industry in the early 17th century. Venice’s population stabilized at about 150,000.

In 1606 a papal interdict condemned Venice for refusing to repeal several laws limiting the church’s traditional rights and for trying two priests in civil rather than ecclesiastical courts. Paolo Sarpi, the republic’s state theologian, mounted an effective defense by arguing for state sovereignty in temporal affairs. The dispute ended in a compromise, mediated by France and Spain. Sarpi’s The History of the Council of Trent (1619) later indicted the pope for usurping ecclesiastical authority and for manipulating the reform council to reinforce his power. The Papal States

The papacy engaged in often flamboyant political maneuvers, especially during the reign of Julius II (1503–13), and in the architectural and intellectual renewal of Rome. Save for the brief reign of the last non-Italian pope before the 20th century, Adrian VI (reigned 1522–23), the papacy failed to respond to the spiritual crisis of the day. However, a predisposition for a religious revival, or Catholic Reformation, was fostered by the Christian humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam’s biblical philosophy of Christ, by prophetic and apocalyptic interpretations of the Italian wars, and by an awareness of long-standing clerical abuses. Yet serious attempts at reform from above did not begin until the reign of Pope Paul III (1534–49). In 1536 he appointed a reform commission, which produced the important blueprint Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (“Project for the Reform of the Church”), and in 1537 he made the first attempt at convoking a reform council. By the 1540s, however, hopes for reunification of Catholics and Protestants had foundered. A true Counter-Reformation—that is, the Roman Catholic Church’s conscious fight against Protestantism—began to take shape with papal approval of the Jesuit order in 1540 and with the creation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1542. New religious orders such as the Theatines (1524), the Capuchins (1528), and the Jesuits (1534) provided the backbone of the new class of religious leaders, although the apostasy to Calvinism in 1542 of Bernardino Ochino, vicar-general of the Capuchins, was a serious setback. The Jesuits’ educational program, above all, began to prepare laymen of high social status for leadership roles. The Council of Trent (1545–63) uncompromisingly defined Catholic dogma and outlined a program for disciplinary reform and administrative centralization. The Index librorum prohibitorum (1559; “Index of Forbidden Books”), a list of books condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as pernicious to faith and morals, was compiled by a censorship board that limited orthodox expression to a narrowly controlled range.

In politics, the papacy was dependent on Spain yet eager to find an alternative to Spanish domination in Italy. Although ecclesiastical reform occupied most of the church’s energies, Pope Pius V (reigned 1566–72) promoted the Holy League, which checked Ottoman expansion into the western Mediterranean by defeating the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto (1571). Under Pope Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–85) the Julian calendar was reformed into the modern Gregorian calendar. Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585–90) launched a Catholic missionary counteroffensive in central Europe and reorganized the Roman Curia. He, along with Clement VIII (reigned 1592–1605), also patronized the urban development and new artistic flowering in Rome that culminated in the Baroque creations of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the architect Francesco Borromini. These two popes also fought rural banditry and brought Ferrara, Urbino, and Castro back under direct papal rule.

Pope Gregory the Great receiving inspiration from the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, painting by Carlo Saraceni, c. 1590; in the National Gallery of Ancient Art, Rome.© Araldo de Luca/Corbis Culture and society

Cities and courts spawned the high culture of late Renaissance Italy. Ranging from Pietro Aretino’s merciless lampoons of the scandalous lives of the princes of the church in Renaissance Rome to the mysticism and Christocentric piety embraced by the intellectual circle surrounding the Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés in Naples, Italian culture in the 16th century defined itself for or against the church. Machiavelli, in a famous chapter of Discorsi sopra la prima deca di tito Livio (1513–19; “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy”), argued that the church was the cause of Italian ills because it had lost its religious moorings and had kept the Italians politically divided. A rigid Counter-Reformation orthodoxy, however, condemned some of Italy’s most brilliant intellectuals—philosophers and scientists such as Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600, Tommaso Campanella, who was imprisoned in 1599 for 27 years, and Galileo Galilei, who was forced to recant his Copernican beliefs and was placed under permanent house arrest in 1633.

At the same time, however, Italy was at the forefront of a movement that fostered scientific exchange by establishing scientific academies—the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (founded in 1603), the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657), and the Neapolitan Accademia degli Investiganti (1665). In fields such as drama (both tragedy and comedy), music (both religious and secular), art history, rhetoric, and political theory, Italians of the late Renaissance played formative roles—the poets Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, the composers Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Claudio Monteverdi, the artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, and the political theorist and statesman Giovanni Botero, to name just a few. These examples demonstrate the continuity of Italy’s cultural achievement in the period that followed the High Renaissance. Society and economy

The expanding demographic and economic base of Italy provided the wherewithal for the political and cultural programs of the 16th century. From the mid-15th-century demographic low point after the 1347–48 plague, Italy, along with the rest of western Europe, recovered dramatically. Between 1400 and 1600 the Italian population nearly doubled, increasing from about 7 million to about 13 million, and prices rose sharply, with cereal prices tripling and quadrupling. Increased demand, the increased supply of money from the silver of the New World, and profligate military expenditures fueled high inflation. Italy’s most distinctive feature was its highly urbanized life. In 1550, 30 cities—more than in any other region in the West—had populations of more than 10,000.

Rural areas nevertheless still accounted for almost 88 percent of the total population, and, given the relative parity in birth and death rates, cities grew primarily as a result of rural emigration. Wheat and wool were the chief agricultural products, and the spread of capitalist agriculture in the 16th century was an important ingredient in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Textile production of both woolens and silks continued to be the major industry in the cities, but the precocious economic development of Italy in manufacturing, trade, and finance came to a crashing halt during the dislocations of the 17th century.

The economic recovery of the second half of the 16th century challenged the traditional hierarchical ordering of society. Nobility and clergy, the two most identifiable groups, did not lose their status but slowly changed character. With the demise of old families and the rise of a new nobility based on wealth and public service, social mobility in the cities put the old aristocracy on the defensive until it was able to forge new alliances with the ruling princes and the bourgeois bankers and merchants. At the same time, demographic growth and a yawning gap between wages and prices threatened to create an even larger disparity between rich and poor. In good times, the lower classes could provide a new labour market, fueling industrial production; in economically bad times, however, sickness, unemployment, and the rising price of bread could drive them down into the vortex of poverty and even push them to the point of rebellion. The 17th-century crisis

The economic boom of the late 16th century began to stall throughout Europe. The first signs of hardship appeared in Italy after 1585, and famine persisted through the 1590s. New waves of plague struck northern Italy and Tuscany in 1630–31 and southern Italy, Lazio, and Genoa in 1656–57, with population losses between one-fourth and one-fifth, respectively. The large cities of Milan, Naples, and Genoa lost as much as half of their population. In addition, war in northern Europe after 1618 and in the Middle East between the Ottomans and the Iranians from 1623–39 disrupted Italy’s important export markets; war between Spanish, German, French, and Piedmontese forces moved to Italy between 1628 and 1659; and social conflicts within the Spanish states contributed to the decline of Italy relative to northwestern Europe.

Both agricultural production and urban industries entered into crisis in the decade 1611–20, reaching their low point about 1650. In the south, extensive wheat monoculture exhausted the soil and led to deforestation and soil erosion. Further, noble owners drained off profits for expenditures on urban luxuries, and indebtedness placed commercial grain farmers at greater risk as grain prices fell in the 17th century. In the north, intensive agriculture supported the numerous large cities, but overexpansion onto unproductive land, soil depletion, and the loss of credit pushed the region to the limits of what the population could support. In the cities, wool manufacturing fell by 50 percent in the 1620s and all but disappeared thereafter, although silk production held its own. Commercial and banking activities, once the fastest-growing industries, now constricted, and foreign imports braked further development at home. Italy’s early industrial lead lost to increased competition from northwestern Europe as new products at lower prices replaced the traditional ones in the Italian markets. The Italian guilds’ opposition to technological and organizational change, higher taxes, and higher labour costs prevented the adaptability required to surmount the short-term crisis, which instead turned into a long-term structural realignment. Only in Lombardy was there a successful shift to the putting-out system, which transfered urban industries to the countryside.

The economic involution reinforced the social hierarchy, favoured investment in landed property and rents over commerce and industry, and reinvigorated noble pretensions. With capital shifted from the manufacturing and service sectors to agricultural production of cash crops such as olive oil, wine, and raw silk, the number of skilled urban craftsmen and merchants decreased while that of illiterate peasants increased, and landed-noble power intensified. The church reasserted itself in every aspect of social life, from land ownership to ecclesiastical organization, from the defense of orthodoxy and the culture of the Council of Trent to the education of the ruling class. As the economic crisis deepened, middling ranks lost out, and social stratification between rich and poor rigidified.

In the political sphere, Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and subsequent wars with other European powers—financed in part by taxes on its Italian possessions—drained Italy. As Spain declined, it dragged its Italian realms down with it. Revolts broke out in Palermo and Naples in 1647. In Naples a revolt of July 7 was mistakenly identified as a plebeian rebellion bearing the name of a young fishmonger, Masaniello, although he was murdered within 10 days and had actually been a tool of bourgeois elements seeking greater political power in the city. The uprising spread to the countryside, established a republic that sought French protection, and assumed the character of an open rebellion against Spain and native feudal lords. Internal dissension and the arrival of the Spanish fleet brought an end to the revolt by April 1648. The social and economic crisis deepened in Naples after the failure of the revolt and a recurrence of the plague in 1656. Lost was any hope of an alliance between the middle classes and the urban proletariat or rural masses against the landed aristocracy. Paradoxically, renewed Spanish reliance on the nobility of the robe fostered the very class that was to lead the cultural renewal that made Naples one of the intellectual centres of 18th-century Italy. Reform and Enlightenment in the 18th century

After the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II (ruled 1665–1700), fighting over the remnants of Spain’s European empire consumed the continent’s powers in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). The Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714) inaugurated a new pattern of state relations in Italy between Austrian Habsburgs, Spanish Bourbons (with Bourbon France always in the background), and the independent states. After complicated military and diplomatic maneuvers, this pattern eventually stabilized into a long-term equilibrium. In the initial treaties, Naples, Sardinia, and Milan (which had incorporated Mantua after the last Gonzaga had sold it to Louis XIV in 1701) passed to the Austrian Habsburgs; and Sicily went to Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy, who assumed the title of king of Sicily. Renewed Spanish hostilities, however, forced Victor Amadeus to cede Sicily to Austria in exchange for Sardinia in the Treaty of The Hague (1720). Spain acquired the duchy of Parma and Piacenza in 1731. In 1734, during the War of the Polish Succession, Charles, son of the Bourbon Philip V of Spain, conquered the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily from Austria. Spain had thus regained its two largest Italian possessions. After the Medici dynasty in Tuscany died out in 1737, Francis Stephen (Francis I)—duke of Lorraine, husband of Maria Theresa of Austria, and Holy Roman emperor after 1745—ruled as grand duke of Tuscany from Vienna. And in 1748, after the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), Austria regained Milan, which it had lost more than once in the preceding years. Society and economy

A slow economic recovery began in Italy in the mid-1680s, but it remained weak into the early 18th century. A slump in the 1730s gave way to strong mid-century economic growth, until the famines of 1763–67 highlighted the weakness and inefficiency of government policies. Regional differences in Italy’s agricultural structure led to even greater divergences between north and south. Whereas some northern urban industries found refuge in smaller centres and rural settings, the south came to rely economically almost exclusively on agriculture. Overall, Italy’s foreign trade decreased and its exports shifted from high-value manufactured goods to relatively inexpensive raw materials (including agricultural products) and semifinished goods, while it became a net importer of finished industrial products. At the same time, the Italian domestic market also contracted, and increasing social and institutional constraints further limited productive and mercantile opportunities. While Italy’s population between 1700 and 1800 rose by about one-third, to 18 million, that of the rest of Europe grew at twice that rate. Italy’s relative demographic and economic stagnation were to prevent an agrarian or industrial revolution during the 18th century.

The aristocracy retained hegemonic control of politics and economics, dominating land ownership and manipulating legal and political institutions in the towns to maintain their position. Tensions and conflicts arose from time to time between the central authority of the absolutist states and the nobility, between the rich bourgeoisie or professional classes and the nobility, and among the nobles themselves, but the nobility blocked, worked out compromises with, and co-opted these rival groups to preserve aristocratic predominance. In the north, especially in the republican states, city oligarchies resisted erosion of their power and privileges. In sharp contrast, the social and economic position of the urban masses and the growing rural population deteriorated, while the difficulties of daily life increased. Political thought and early attempts at reform

By the beginning of the 18th century, a new cultural climate opened Italy to a wide range of European ideas—especially the philosophical thought of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Benedict de Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Hugo Grotius. With it new cultural institutions came to the fore. The Academy of Arcadia, founded in Rome in 1690, exemplified the channeling of energies for rationalism and innovation. Among its more famous members, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, and Giambattista Vico gained renown by launching juridical, historical, aesthetic, and “scientific” critiques of society. Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725; The New Science), the most enduring work produced by this group, found tepid reception in its own day, and the author’s ideas on a universal philosophy of history won wide acceptance among Enlightenment thinkers only in the 1770s. Paolo Mattia Doria (1662?–1746) and the Medinaceli Academy in Naples also employed historical inquiry to seek remedies for society’s ills. Doria revived the idea of a Platonic republicanism of philosophic magistrates, in which an anti-Enlightenment Catholicism would become a kind of civil religion. In Naples he led his group of self-styled “ancients” against the scientific “moderns” led by the Neapolitan diplomat Celestino Galiani and Bartolomeo Intieri, a Florentine factor in Naples who provided a link to Tuscan intellectual circles. The ministerial class that developed in Spanish Italy from the early 16th century helped foster such networks of intellectual exchange between the cities of Italy and between Italy and the broader cosmopolitan centres of 18th-century Europe.

The political and cultural roles of the church—in particular, the supranational character of the papacy, the immunity of clerics from the state’s legal and fiscal apparatus, the church’s intolerance and intransigence in theological and institutional matters, as well as its wealth and property—constituted the central problems in the reform schemes of Italy’s nascent intellectual movement. The most incisive breakthrough came from Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), a Neapolitan jurist, who employed a jurisdictional, historical method to oppose church abuse of power and to break the church’s stranglehold on the state. Probably the strongest arguments for church reform came from Enlightenment thinkers Francesco Scipione, marchese di Maffei (1675–1755), and Muratori (1672–1750), who sought to reconcile politics with morality and religion. Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità (1749; “On Public Happiness”) reached Bourbon audiences in French and Spanish translations and was probably read in the Austrian Habsburg realms by Maria Theresa herself. The era of Enlightenment reform

By the mid-18th century, economic recovery, Muratori’s program of Enlightenment Catholicism, and a renewed interest in natural science, political economy, and agronomy produced the first stirrings of reform. The dynasties installed after the wars of succession—the Habsburg-Lorraine in Milan and Tuscany and the Bourbon in Naples—led the way. Milan

A first wave of reforms under Maria Theresa came to Milan in the early 1740s. The Genoese patrician Gian Luca Pallavicini prepared them as a minister after 1743 and then implemented them as governor after 1750. The reforms reorganized government administration, ended the sale of offices, reordered state finances, founded a public bank, and, most important, in 1749 placed a new cadastral survey—begun in 1718 but interrupted in 1733—under the direction of the Florentine jurist Pompeo Neri. The Theresian cadastral survey took effect in 1760. Applying objective principles of fiscal justice and administrative rationalization, the new method of registering the ownership and value of property not only revamped Milan’s fiscal system but also improved agriculture, increased productivity, and centralized control of revenues in impartial hands.

In Vienna the Department of Italy oversaw Milanese affairs after 1757 and orchestrated a second wave of reforms during the 1760s. Another imperial official, Carlo, conte di Firmian of Trent, arrived in 1759 to implement wide-ranging changes. Firmian completed the earlier reforms in political administration, in the judicial system, in ecclesiastical relations, and in educational policy. But strong opposition from diverse social groups defending traditional rights and privileges weakened the reform movement. In 1761–62, however, an important group of young reformist noblemen formed around Pietro Verri (1728–97) and took the name of his militant journal, Il caffè (published 1764–66; “The Coffeehouse”). The circle’s best-known work, Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; An Essay On Crimes and Punishments), castigated torture and capital punishment as symptoms of the injustice and inequality inherent in the society of the old regime.

Joseph II (ruled 1765–90) promoted a new wave of reforms after 1770 that gained strength when he became the sole ruler after Maria Theresa’s death in 1780. The old system of public administration and magistratures came under attack and was abolished by 1786. In the 1770s and ’80s the reform policies of “Josephism” succeeded in suppressing all the chief political and judicial bodies of the Milanese aristocracy and in establishing modern ones in their place. Joseph’s government appointed provincial intendants and reduced the church’s power in the state. Educational reform established popular elementary schools as well as new disciplines at the Palatine School of Milan and the University of Pavia.

Such reforms, however, proved to have few long-term cultural or social consequences. Opposition from nobles, local administrators, aristocratic landlords, magistrates, clergy, and even Enlightenment intellectuals, who feared Joseph’s new authoritarianism, undermined the reforms. Leopold II (ruled 1790–92), who had ruled Tuscany as Grand Duke Peter Leopold before succeeding his brother Joseph, could not overcome their resistance, which gained strength from the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. Francis II, who succeeded Leopold II in 1792, faced a war with Revolutionary France, which seized Milan in 1796. Tuscany

Emmanuel, comte de Richecourt, who served in Tuscany for 20 years as the chief representative of the regent, Francis I, followed the main lines of Habsburg policy in Milan. Local aristocratic divisions, the privileged position of Florence (the Tuscan capital), and the corruption and private enrichment of public officials came under scrutiny. Reforms aimed to restore revenues, reorganize magistratures, control the old nobility, and moderate the influence of the church. Pompeo Neri, who was recalled from Milan to Florence in 1758, advocated the free trade of cereals to address problems of economic scarcity and provide incentives to agricultural production.

Physiocratic solutions to economic problems—that is, solutions based on laissez-faire economics and on the belief that land is the source of all wealth—characterized Tuscany under the leadership of Peter Leopold (laterLeopold II" class="md-crosslink"> Leopold II), who ruled from 1765 to 1790. The Accademia dei Georgofili, founded in 1753, exercised a wide influence on a range of issues touching on agrarian reform. Legislation confirmed the free trade in grain in 1767, suppressed artisanal guilds in 1771, and eliminated all internal customs duties in 1781. Peter Leopold planned to redistribute church and state land to a new class of independent small farmers. These, in turn, would form a genuine foundation for a new kind of polity based on a constitutional monarchy with representative assemblies. Although the land reform occurred from 1766 to 1784, the constitutional reform never matured. Peter Leopold’s reforms completely transformed the bureaucratic and administrative state machinery, vigorously attacked church property and prerogatives, overhauled the judiciary, and promulgated a new penal code, which was the first in Europe to abolish the death penalty. Tuscany served as a true European model of Enlightenment absolutism for 25 years. But, upon the grand duke’s election as emperor at his brother Joseph’s death in 1790, Tuscany, left to his son, Ferdinand III, erupted in violence as hostile clerics and civil servants manipulated the European crisis of the 1790s against Leopold’s reforms. Naples and Sicily

Under Austrian Habsburg rule after 1707, Naples witnessed numerous reform plans but little concrete action. When Sicily came under Austrian rule in 1720, similar good intentions foundered in the face of local resistance, a worsening international economy, and the political exigencies and fiscal burdens of imminent wars. With the conquest of Naples and Sicily in 1734 by Charles of Bourbon (who ruled as Charles VII until 1759), the Italian south celebrated its nominal independence under a new foreign dynasty. The new regime introduced significant reforms, including new administrative and judicial systems, fostered economic recovery, and patronized an important Enlightenment community. The discipline of political economy originated during this period with the publication in 1751 of Ferdinando Galiani’s treatise Della moneta (“On Money”) and Antonio Genovesi’s appointment in 1754 to the first university chair in political economy.

In 1759 Charles abdicated his Neapolitan throne in order to become King Charles III of Spain, leaving his minister Bernardo Tanucci to head the regency council of his son Ferdinand IV (ruled 1759–1825). The turning point in the Neapolitan reform movement came with a catastrophic famine in 1764, which urgently called into question the effectiveness of old-regime structures. After Ferdinand’s marriage to Maria Carolina, the daughter of Maria Theresa, Tanucci began to lose favour with the disengaged, weak monarch. He was forced to resign in 1776, having pushed Bourbon reform to its limits, although with few tangible results. Naples moved away from its Spanish Bourbon ties and into the orbit of Habsburg policies. Fearing that the reforms had run their course, Genovesi’s students in and out of government—Giuseppe Maria Galanti, Francesco Longano, Traiano Odazzi, and the Grimaldi brothers, Domenico and Francesco Antonio—pursued his interests in solving economic and agricultural problems. The 1780s were the high point of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, both through their work and through the writings of Genovesi’s students Francesco Maria Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. The latter’s Scienza della legislazione (1780–85; The Science of Legislation), which called for equal justice for all, state intervention in economic affairs, and broad educational reforms, ranks among the most important works of the European Enlightenment. At the same time, Domenico Caracciolo, the viceroy to Sicily from 1781 to 1785, implemented a reform program that abolished the Inquisition and challenged the fabric of the feudal system, but again without concrete results. In the end, political ties to Austria and Britain against Revolutionary France put Naples on the defensive, and, when France invaded in January 1799, the monarchs fled to Palermo for safety, and the French established a republic. The other Italian states

The Papal States, the states governed by the pope—Venice, Genoa, and Savoy—eschewed political-institutional reform. The theocratic monarchy of Rome, however, was open to moderate forms of Enlightenment thought under Clement XII (1730–40) and Benedict XIV (1740–58). Under Bourbon pressure the papacy even disbanded the Jesuits in 1773, albeit sometime after their expulsion from Portugal (1759) and from Bourbon Spain, Naples, and Parma (1767–68). Venice and Genoa lost ground as international powers and remained subject to a shrinking, conservative patriciate. Venice, however, remained Italy’s most important publishing centre and home to a lively literary and artistic culture including figures such as the dramatist Carlo Goldoni and the painters Giovanni Antonio Guardi and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In Piedmont and Sardinia the long reign of Charles Emmanuel III (ruled 1730–73) further developed Savoyard militaristic absolutism and administrative centralization without the liberal spirit of Enlightenment reform. The crisis of the old regime

The French Revolution did not create the continentwide crisis that followed in its wake; rather, the revolutionary repercussions that rocked polities and societies after 1789 arose from the long-standing and unaddressed problems of the old regime. French and Austrian Enlightenment thought circulated freely in Italy, and a wide range of Italian intellectuals and ministers contributed to the growing body of Enlightenment thought and practice that emphasized secularization and science. However, this cosmopolitan movement confronted powerful feudal and ecclesiastical estates that controlled vast land and wealth, combated bad government that had grown habitually resistant to rationalization, struggled with the difficult task of reforming a retrograde economic system unsupportive of trade or industry, and, at the same time, found itself out of touch with the daily concerns of the mass of society facing economic hardship and wedded to traditional religious beliefs. Enlightenment culture ultimately exacerbated the problem of reform, since reform from above highlighted the disparities between high and low, raised unrealizable expectations, and imposed solutions that rarely overhauled the structure of power. The inequalities in Italian society, the obstacles to its economic development, and the political conservatism of its privileged interest groups would not easily yield to reason alone. John A. Marino John Foot Revolution, restoration, and unification The French Revolutionary period

When French troops invaded Italy in the spring of 1796, they found fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas and practices of their native country. Since the 1780s, Italian newspapers and pamphlets had given full play to news from France, especially to the political struggle between the king and the Parlement of Paris. As the Revolution unfolded in France, news reports became more frequent and more dramatic. After 1791 they were further enhanced by the personal testimonies of political émigrés. Vigilant censorship by the Italian governments could not stop the spread of revolutionary ideas. Yet Italians viewed the French Revolution simplistically as a struggle between monarchists and revolutionaries. The early years

As the reformist impulse of the 1780s waned, Italians took a growing interest in the French Revolution. Educated landowners and entrepreneurs who had put their trust in the enlightened rulers of their own states and had looked forward to important administrative and political reforms were disappointed. The French example gave them new hope. During the 1780s Masonic lodges had begun to replace scholarly academies and agrarian societies as loci of political discussion. In the 1790s more-radical secret societies emerged, modeled after the Illuminati (“Enlightened Ones”) founded in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law, which promoted free thought and democratic political theories.

The Italian governments opposed French Revolutionary ideas, recognizing them as a potential threat to stability. The outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars confirmed their fears. After French armies in 1792 occupied Savoy and Nice, which belonged to the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont (ruled by the house of Savoy), the kingdom joined the First Coalition, an alliance formed in 1793 by powers opposed to Revolutionary France. The arrival of the French fleet in the Bay of Naples in December 1792 prevented the king of Naples from following the Piedmontese example, but other governments resorted to stern repression of French-inspired protests. Many Italians, however, viewed the Revolutionary French legal and administrative system as the only answer to their own grievances against traditional elites. In Piedmont and Naples, where discontent was especially widespread, proponents of democratic ideas organized actual conspiracies. Arrested conspirators who escaped death or jail found refuge in France, where they became influential and active.

Italian émigrés helped to give a sharper focus to the aims of revolutionary protest and to prepare the ground for French intervention in the peninsula. The best-known émigré, the Tuscan nobleman Filippo Buonarroti, served as national commissioner in the Ligurian town of Oneglia, captured by French armies in 1794. Oneglia became the location for the first revolutionary experiment on Italian soil when Buonarroti introduced a republican constitution and the cult of the Supreme Being and abolished seigneurial rights. The “Oneglia experiment” ended abruptly in 1795 with the fall of Maximilien Robespierre’s government in France, but Buonarroti persisted in his radical beliefs, becoming a supporter of the French left-wing agitator François-Noël (Gracchus) Babeuf. The precedent he had set was not forgotten. French invasion of Italy

The French campaign in Italy, which assured the political future of Napoleon Bonaparte, began in March 1796. According to the Peace of Paris (May 15, 1796), King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia-Piedmont was forced to cede Savoy and Nice to France and to grant safe passage to the French armies. On the same day, Napoleon’s army drove the Austrians out of Milan, pursuing them into the territory of the Republic of Venice. By April 1797 the French controlled the entire Po valley, including Bologna and the northern reaches of the Republic of Venice, which the pope had ceded to them in the Peace of Tolentino (February 19, 1797). French armies also occupied the duchy of Modena and most of the grand duchy of Tuscany, including the port of Livorno. After defeating the Austrians on Venetian territory during the winter of 1796–97, Napoleon turned his offensive northward, crossing the Tagliamento River and driving for the Habsburg capital, Vienna. In April 1797, at Leoben, Austrian envoys offered to negotiate. In exchange for an end to the French offensive, Austria agreed to partition Venetia and to recognize French sovereignty over Austria’s former possessions in the Low Countries and Lombardy. For the next two years the Italian peninsula enjoyed a period of relative freedom and democracy, which ended with the Austro-Russian campaign against France in April 1799. Roots of the Risorgimento

The origins of the Italian Risorgimento—the great national “resurgence” of the 19th century—date to this period, insofar as the period gave rise to political groups that affirmed the right of the Italian people to a government suited to their desires and traditions, as well as to the growth of a sense of nationalism and individual responsibility.

In 1800 the Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco argued that the Italian revolution of the 1790s had been a “passive revolution” without real roots in Italian soil or a national ruling elite. Later generations of historians repeated and endorsed this view, arguing that Italian Jacobinism had imitated Robespierre’s ideology. They tried to distinguish between Jacobin republicanism and more moderate, indigenous political movements. However, in reality, the Italian Jacobins often modified their positions from political necessity. Some who had advocated radical republicanism and democracy in the 1780s and ’90s accepted important offices in the Napoleonic governments of the early 1800s. The essential difference between moderate and radical Francophiles lay in the different meanings that each group gave to the concept of democracy. The doctrine of equality, for instance, could be restricted to equality before the law, or it could be expanded to include social and economic equality, which would shake the foundation of private property. Depending on their definition of equality, the two groups could take very different approaches to taxation, economic regulation, and public education. The Italian republics of 1796–99

During the revolutionary triennium (1796–99), political initiative in Italy remained in French hands. The moderate heads of the post-Jacobin Directory regarded the conquered Italian territories primarily as bargaining chips. However, Napoleon, as commander of the French armies in Italy, worked actively to establish “sister republics.” He hoped for financially stable and politically dependable governments that would recognize French hegemony, adopt French legislation, and hold radical elements at bay. Thus, he supported the establishment of moderate republican governments headed by prominent Italian citizens.

The first of these, the Cispadane Republic, was established at Modena in March 1797; in July it merged with the Cisalpine Republic, which encompassed Lombardy. Although strong enough militarily to deter an Austrian offensive, the republic remained torn internally by strife between moderates and radicals. Democratic clubs and newspapers continued to resist control from Paris. Yet the moderates, under French tutelage, gradually emerged as a new bureaucratic and political class. A third republic, the Ligurian Republic, incorporating the former republic of Genoa, was proclaimed on June 6, 1797. It was ruled by members of the local aristocracy, who worked hand in hand with the Directory in Paris and blocked union with the Cisalpine Republic. In Piedmont the Savoy government suppressed Jacobin uprisings until the French forced the king to leave, annexing his territories in February 1799. When Napoleon ceded Venetia to Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797), Italian revolutionaries felt outraged and betrayed. Ugo Foscolo expressed their disillusionment in his novel Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798; “The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis”). To keep both a hostile Pope Pius VI and the democratic clubs in check, the French occupied Rome in January 1798 and proclaimed a Roman Republic on March 15. Although the democratic Constitutional Club in Rome remained strong, moderate leaders maintained control. The southern exile Vincenzo Russo described these events in his Pensieri politici (1798; “Political Meditations”), one of the most important examples of Italian Jacobin thought.

The situation in Italy changed in November 1797 when Napoleon departed on his ill-fated expedition to Egypt. Under pressure from England, King Ferdinand IV of Naples invaded the Roman Republic and attempted to restore the papal government in Rome. The French armies launched a counteroffensive. King Ferdinand took refuge in Sicily under the protection of the British fleet, and French troops occupied Naples on January 23, 1799, and established the Parthenopean Republic. Although the Parthenopean Republic controlled only some of the provinces of the former Bourbon kingdom—others remained under Bourbon rule or in the throes of anarchy—it became the most democratic of all revolutionary governments of the triennium. This owed largely to the French military commander Jean-Étienne Championnet, as well as to the commissioner Marc-Antoine Jullien. Previously a follower of Babeuf, Jullien defied the wishes of the Directory in Paris for a moderate government. The Parthenopean Republic had the enthusiastic support of a number of southern intellectuals and notables (members of the social or economic elite). Collapse of the republics

Early in 1799 the French situation in Italy deteriorated rapidly. After the birth of the Second Coalition against France (March 1799), Austrian and Russian troops were able to occupy the Cisalpine Republic and to reach Turin in less than two months. Thus, the French lost the entire Po valley. In addition, most of the French army was forced to withdraw from Naples. The destruction of the Parthenopean Republic was the work of bands of peasants organized by Fabrizio Cardinal Ruffo, a faithful adherent of the king. Ruffo’s bands quickly disposed of the weak democratic militia. Their Armata della Santa Fede (“Army of the Holy Faith”) was the most important peasant uprising in the history of modern Italy. Invoking God and king, they devastated the castles of the aristocracy and occupied communal lands that the local barons had usurped; they also killed bourgeois leaders who had set up provisional municipal governments. The reaction against the French and the indigenous Jacobins became a great antiaristocratic movement, which the Bourbon monarchy skillfully manipulated to its advantage. Naples surrendered on June 23, 1799, and soon afterward the king returned from Sicily. At the behest of the British admiral Horatio Nelson and Queen Maria Carolina, wife of Ferdinand and a sister of Marie-Antoinette of France, the king (violating the terms of the surrender) ordered the execution of more than 100 revolutionary leaders. Among them were the best southern administrators, jurists, and intellectuals.

The French, who had occupied Tuscany between March and July 1799, were driven out by a violent peasant uprising, the Viva Maria (“Long Live the Virgin Mary”). This movement developed into a march on urban centres, assaults on Jewish residents, and a hunt for real or alleged local Jacobins; it also reestablished the power of the landowning aristocracy and of the clergy. The Roman Republic fell in September 1799. The French resisted only in Genoa, while a large number of Italian Jacobins took refuge in France. Thus ended the revolutionary triennium.

The pro-French patrioti (“patriots”) had completely failed to enlist the support of the masses. From the summer of 1796 the rural districts were in ferment but almost always in opposition to the new rulers. There were peasant marches on cities in Lombardy, the Romagna, and Tuscany. Armed bands controlled or recaptured parts of the Marche, Tuscany, and the Kingdom of Naples. In some cities, such as Verona and especially Naples, popular dislike of the French and the local Jacobins was manifest. This antirevolutionary sentiment derived to some extent from the influence of the clergy and the high taxes levied by the republican regimes. However, it stemmed primarily from the populace’s ingrained and instinctive conservatism, which only the gradual development of a grassroots opposition movement was later able to overcome.

The Italian Jacobins, defeated in domestic political struggles, also suffered a deep loss of respect for their French ally. Money levies for military purposes degenerated into pure plunder; constitutions were not democratically drafted but dictated by the French; supporters of the democratic opposition were jailed or removed from office. Worst of all, Napoleon showed an autocratic tendency and a lack of commitment to republicanism in his policy of returning the king of Sardinia-Piedmont to the throne in the summer of 1796 and of ceding Venetia to the Habsburgs in 1797. Disillusionment with French policies, however, did not reconcile the Italian Jacobins with their former rulers; instead, it bolstered their nationalism. In Piedmont, for instance, a secret society, I Raggi (“The Beams of Light”), advocated a democratic, unionist, and anti-French program that would lead Italy toward unity and independence. The French Consulate, 1799–1804

After gaining control of France in his coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire (November 9–10, 1799), Napoleon renewed his Italian campaign. His armies crossed the Alps again, this time through the difficult Great Saint Bernard Pass, and reoccupied Milan on June 2, 1800. A few days later they scored a definitive victory over the Austrians at Marengo, between the Po and Bormida rivers. Defeated also on German soil, the Second Coalition quickly collapsed. The Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801) reestablished the Ligurian and Cisalpine republics. Piedmont was reannexed to France in September 1802, together with Elba and Piombino. The duchy of Parma was also annexed, although annexation became official only in 1808. Even in Tuscany, Austrian influence ended when Louis, son of Ferdinand of Parma, was declared king of Etruria. In northern Italy, Austria retained only Venetia, while France directly or indirectly controlled the areas from the Alps to the Tuscan coast. In the south the papal and Bourbon governments remained in power, but their positions were weak.

The second Cisalpine Republic, established in June 1800, proved to be a transitional regime, since it lacked the necessary combined support of the moderates and landowners. In Paris Napoleon’s most trusted adviser on Italian affairs was the Milanese patrician Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who during the triennium had hoped to see northern Italy united in a constitutional monarchy under a Habsburg or Bourbon prince. Melzi was the most clear-sighted exponent of an older moderate ruling class that still yearned for enlightened autocracy. Napoleon also favoured the formation of a large Italian state, provided he could control it. His preference was for an Italian republic with a constitution on the French model. Central authority was to be vested in a president, with a relatively weak representative body divided among three estates—landowners, merchants and tradesmen, and intellectuals and clerics. Napoleon wanted to assume the presidency himself or to name a member of his family to the position. At Melzi’s insistence, however, the new state was not simply proclaimed by the French but was created by an Italian constituent assembly meeting in Lyon, France, in January 1802. Napoleon was elected president of the new Italian Republic, though not without opposition, and Melzi became its vice president. Melzi pursued a policy of compromise and co-option. Although notables, mostly members of the aristocracy, held most of the prefectures and ministries, representatives of the democratic opposition were gradually included and given important posts. Throughout the Napoleonic period, the republican government worked to create an Italian army, and enduring nationalist sentiments emerged in military ranks. Serving as administrators and political leaders, the local nobles and educated bourgeois for the first time felt an obligation to govern and defend their country together. The Napoleonic empire, 1804–14 Northern and central Italy

Soon after Napoleon claimed the title of emperor in 1804, the Italian Republic became a kingdom, proclaimed on March 17, 1805. Napoleon, as king of Italy, appointed his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, as viceroy and Antonio Aldini as secretary of state, forcing Melzi to step aside. Although Italian autonomy remained limited, Napoleon’s victories, which constantly increased the territory of the kingdom, provided some compensation. Venetia was annexed to it by the Treaty of Pressburg (December 26, 1805), and Dalmatia and Istria were attached to the kingdom with a separate constitution. In a reorganization following the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14, 1809), Dalmatia and Istria were joined with Trieste and Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia), together with other territories ceded by Austria, to form the seven French départements of the Illyrian provinces. The Marche became part of the Italian kingdom in April 1808. Liguria was directly annexed to France on June 4, 1805, as was Tuscany in March 1808. In 1809 Napoleon abolished the temporal power of the papacy and annexed Rome and the remainder of the Papal States to France. Pope Pius VII responded by excommunicating Napoleon, who in response held the pontiff prisoner, first in France and later in the Ligurian town of Savona.

As emperor of France and king of Italy, Napoleon directly controlled all of northern and central Italy. During his rule, far-reaching reforms were instituted. Although the new Italian legal codes were translated almost verbatim from the French with little regard for Italian traditions, they introduced a modern jurisprudence responsive to the rights of the individual citizen. Properties held in mortmain, the old feudal ecclesiastical tenure (specifically those of the regular clergy), were transferred to the state and sold. The remaining feudal rights and jurisdictions were abolished. Roads were improved everywhere, and both primary and higher education were strengthened. In return for higher taxes, Italians thus gained a network of new and improved services that were to hasten Italian social and economic progress and cohesion.

The Continental System, a blockade designed to close the entire European continent to British trade, was proclaimed on November 21, 1806. It was freely violated everywhere, including along the Italian coastline. Although the blockade’s real purpose was to promote the growth of French manufacturing, especially the silk industry, by protecting it against imports, the war economy and blockade also stimulated Italian production, prompted the emergence of machine-building and metallurgy sectors, and spurred the completion of important public works. The Kingdom of Naples

In the south, after the repression and executions of 1799, the Bourbons experimented with some cautious reforms, mainly fiscal and antifeudal. These were implemented to strengthen the loyalty of the rural population, which had already proved so valuable to the monarchy. But the Neapolitan government was desperately weak, both politically and militarily. Indeed, the French reoccupied the country between February and March 1806, and the Bourbon court once more fled to Sicily. On March 30, 1806, Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was proclaimed king of Naples. When he became king of Spain in 1808, he was replaced by one of the most famous French generals, Joachim Murat. Despite this change, the nine years of French rule in southern Italy were a period of continuity, and, consequently, French reforms had a lasting impact. Joachim Murat was more independent of Paris than Joseph Bonaparte had been. During his reign there were fewer French ministers and advisers in proportion to Neapolitan officials, and he opposed the enforcement of the Continental System. Feudal privileges and immunities were finally abolished, although the landed aristocracy retained extensive power in the countryside. By purchasing the property confiscated from the church and from exiled landowners, southern notables subverted Murat’s plan to distribute small landholdings to peasant families. Much common land, originally usurped by large landowners, was recovered, but this worked to the benefit of bourgeois notables known in the south as galantuomini (“honourable men”). Fiscal, judicial, and educational reforms, similar to those introduced in the Kingdom of Italy, were implemented in Naples. Sardinia and Sicily

Meanwhile, both Sardinia, where the Savoy court took refuge, and Sicily remained apart from the Napoleonic world. In Sicily the Bourbons were under strict English control, not only militarily but also politically. In 1811–12, when the king clashed with the Sicilian nobles, mostly over taxation, the British naval commander Lord William Bentinck intervened. He introduced a moderate constitution that left much power in the hands of the nobles but markedly limited the absolute powers of the throne. Sicily then experienced a short period of autonomy with intense political ferment, which ended in 1816 when the restored Bourbons abrogated the constitution and reunited the island with the Kingdom of Naples to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The end of French rule

The Napoleonic regime collapsed in Italy as it did in the rest of Europe. Beauharnais and Murat, with their respective armies, had taken part in Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. At the moment of defeat, Murat deserted the emperor, returned to Naples, and made peace with the English and the Austrians. Joining them in their campaign against Beauharnais, though without a full commitment, he advanced with his Neapolitan troops as far as the Po River (March 1814). By the terms of the armistice of Schiarino-Rizzino (April 16, 1814), Beauharnais was able to retain control of Lombardy. But an insurrection in Milan on April 20 allowed the Austrians to occupy the entire region. The restoration period The Vienna settlement

The Congress of Vienna (1814–15), held by the victorious allies to restore the prerevolutionary European political status quo, determined that the Bourbons should be returned to Naples. For this reason, taking advantage of Napoleon’s escape from Elba to France on March 1, 1815, and his return to power, Joachim Murat opted to change sides yet one more time and declared war on Austria on March 15, 1815. In the Rimini proclamation of March 30 he incited all Italian nationalists to war, but no general insurrection occurred. Quickly defeated, Murat was forced to abdicate in May. From his exile in Corsica he moved to a base in Calabria to attempt the reconquest of his kingdom. Recaptured by Bourbon troops, he was executed in October 1815.

The Congress of Vienna established the political order in Italy that lasted until unification between 1859 and 1870. According to the Final Act of the congress, Francis I of Austria also became king of Lombardy-Venetia, which was incorporated into the Habsburg state. The former episcopal principality of Trento was formally annexed to Austria. King Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy recovered his territories (Nice, Savoy, and Piedmont) and acquired the Ligurian coast, including Genoa. The duchy of Parma was granted to Marie-Louise of Habsburg, the daughter of Francis I and Napoleon’s second wife. At her death the duchy was to revert to the Bourbon-Parma family, which was also temporarily placed in charge of the duchy of Lucca. The Habsburg-Este family returned to Modena and inherited the duchy of Massa in 1825. Also in Tuscany, the Habsburg-Lorraine family added the State of the Garrisons to its former domains and was given claim to Lucca, which the Bourbon-Parma family was to relinquish in 1847. The pope recovered his temporal domain in central Italy. Ferdinand IV of Naples reassumed control of his former realm under the new title of Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies.

Thus, the Vienna settlement dismantled the three aristocratic republics of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca; it strengthened Piedmont and restored undisputed Austrian hegemony in the peninsula. Austrian troops garrisoned Ferrara, ready to intervene in case of trouble in the Papal States. Austria gained the right to intervene in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, if necessary. Members of the house of Habsburg ruled over Parma, Modena, and Tuscany; and Venetia and Lombardy became, in practice, provinces of the Austrian Empire. Only the Savoy kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont remained outside the Austrian system designed and imposed on Italy by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens, Fürst (prince) von Metternich. Under Russia’s secret protection the Savoy government proved dependably reactionary.

On April 7, 1815, Francis I proclaimed the formation of the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. The new state was a fiction, however, because the two regions remained separate, each subject to the central ministries in Vienna. Milan lost its role as a capital, most of the Napoleonic administration was dismantled, and the centralizing authority of Vienna became all-pervasive. Many reforms, especially legal reforms, were abolished. Austria reacted to widespread discontent with increasingly severe police measures and stricter censorship, suppressing, for example, the liberal and Romantic periodical Il conciliatore (“The Conciliator”) after only one year of publication (1818–19).

Returning to Piedmont from his refuge in Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy abolished all laws promulgated by the French and removed from public office all those who had collaborated with them. He invited the Jesuits back into the kingdom and turned many educational institutions over to them and to other religious orders. This extreme reaction provoked liberal opposition among enlightened members of Piedmont’s upper classes.

Francis IV of Modena demonstrated comparable intransigence; but, in Parma, Marie-Louise of Habsburg practiced political moderation and preserved many French reforms. Although Francophiles were expelled from the Tuscan administration and some French reforms were abolished, Tuscany under Ferdinand III of Habsburg-Lorraine and his successor, Leopold II, became known for economic liberalism and lenient censorship. Intellectual life flourished in Tuscany with the arrival from other regions of exiled writers, such as the poets Giacomo Leopardi and Niccolò Tommaseo and the historian Pietro Colletta. These men gathered around the Gabinetto di Lettura (“Literary Club”) of Gian Pietro Vieusseux, founder of an important periodical, L’antologia (1821–33; “The Anthology”).

In the Papal States the restoration, achieved principally by the diplomacy of the cautious secretary of state, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, brought increasing government centralization. Educated men who had held positions of responsibility under the French and Italian governments resented bitterly the restoration of clerical control over all aspects of public life. Dissatisfaction was especially strong in the Romagna.

In Naples the victorious powers made sure that the Bourbons would not repeat the reprisals of 1799. Thus, the restoration appeared to begin well under the balanced policies of a government led by Luigi de’ Medici, who absorbed part of Murat’s capable bureaucracy. Many judicial and administrative reforms of the French era survived, but concessions made to the church in a concordat concluded in 1818, as well as financial retrenchment, hampered the progress of the bourgeoisie. Especially among the galantuomini, who had profited from French legislation, strong discontent found an outlet in a widespread secret society, I Carbonari (“The Charcoal Burners”). Already in existence under French rule, apparently with a vaguely nationalist program, the society gained strength and formulated more-definite constitutional aims. The southern bourgeoisie was determined to take part in political life and to promote its interests openly. From the south the lodges of the Carbonari quickly spread to the Marche, the Romagna, Piedmont, and Lombardy.

Spain experienced a revolution in 1820, in which the Liberals gained power and reestablished a constitution promulgated in 1812. This event had notable repercussions in Italy. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, former members of Murat’s army, affiliated with the Carbonari, marched on Naples (July 2, 1820) to the cry of “Long live liberty and the constitution.” They found support in the army and among the bourgeoisie. King Ferdinand was forced to yield to demands for the introduction of the Spanish constitution, which limited royal powers, decreased centralization, and reduced the influence of the capital. The new regime proved short-lived, however, for it had too many enemies. The king sought to recover his former powers; and Sicilian dissidents attempted to reestablish their island’s separate status, though their movement was brutally suppressed by the Neapolitan constitutional government, assisted by Austria. Invoking the Austrian right to intervene if necessary to maintain the restored Bourbon monarchy, in January 1821 Metternich convened an international congress at Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia) attended by representatives of the European powers and of the Italian states, including King Ferdinand himself. Overcoming weak Anglo-French opposition, Ferdinand obtained approval for military intervention. Accordingly, the Austrian army entered the kingdom and occupied Naples on March 23, 1821, reestablishing the king’s absolute government.

In Piedmont the more liberal and educated wing of the nobility resented Victor Emmanuel I’s reactionary policies and found allies among bourgeois groups that had adopted the constitutional program of the Carbonari. In the wake of the Neapolitan revolution, a conspiracy began with the support of Liberals in Lombardy and, covertly, of the heir apparent to the throne of Sardinia-Piedmont, Charles Albert, principe di Carignano. Between March 9 and 13, 1821, the revolt, organized by military and bourgeois leaders, spread from Alessandria to Turin. Victor Emmanuel I abdicated in favour of his brother, Charles Felix, and, in the latter’s absence from the kingdom, appointed Charles Albert as regent. On March 14, Charles Albert proclaimed the Spanish constitution of 1812, though its implementation was contingent on the new king’s approval. From his refuge in Modena, Charles Felix refused to accept it; with Austrian help and loyal Piedmontese troops, he quickly occupied the kingdom and established his authority. Three conspirators were executed and many more imprisoned or exiled. Charles Albert succeeded in reconciling with Charles Felix, but his vacillating conduct marked him for years to come. The Liberals never forgave him his compromises with Charles Felix, who ruled until 1831.

Although there was no revolution in Lombardy-Venetia, a complex network of opponents of the regime was discovered and suppressed. In October 1820 the Carbonari in Milan were attacked, and some were deported. In March 1821 the police penetrated another secret organization, I Federati (“The Confederates”), led by the Milanese nobleman Federico Confalonieri. The society favoured constitutional government, but its program was more moderate than that of the Carbonari though no less anti-Austrian. From December 1821 to January 1823 members of the conspiracy were unmasked in the army and the upper bureaucracy and received death sentences, all of which were eventually commuted to long prison terms. Economic slump and revival

A severe economic recession accompanied this period of political reaction, which continued in the Romagna until as late as 1828. After the famine of 1816–17, Russian grain flooded the Italian market and contributed to a crisis of agricultural overproduction. The desperate poverty of the peasantry led to grain riots, brigandage, and the spread of pellagra, a vitamin-deficiency disease endemic among the northern peasantry, whose diet relied heavily on corn (maize). The slump continued until nearly 1830, when successful mulberry cultivation brought renewed rural prosperity and was sufficient, particularly in Piedmont and Lombardy, to reestablish agricultural credit and provide capital for the growth of textile and engineering industries.

Renewed prosperity supported a revival of cultural activities, and many periodicals addressed the country’s economic and social problems. The most notable of these publications was the philosopher Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s Annali universali di statistica (“World Statistical Almanac”), which published the first essays of his most important pupil, Carlo Cattaneo. Until this period Lombard and Tuscan moderates had dominated political and cultural criticism, but they were now joined by expatriates from other regions and by Roman Catholic and democratic thinkers. The rebellions of 1831 and their aftermath

The July Revolution of 1830 in Paris set in motion an Italian conspiratorial movement in Modena and in other Emilian towns. Two Carbonari, Enrico Misley and Ciro Menotti, put their trust in the duke of Modena, Francis IV of Habsburg-Este, who was looking for an opportunity to expand his small state. But when Francis discovered that the Austrian police knew of the plot, he had Menotti and others arrested. Nevertheless, the revolt spread to the Romagna and to all parts of the Papal States except Lazio. For various reasons the provisional governments of the insurgent cities failed to organize for a common military defense and did not receive the hoped-for help of the French army. During March 1831 the Austrian army intervened and reestablished the status quo ante. The failure of the uprisings of 1831 suggests that the program of the Carbonari had run its course.

The moderate Liberals, most of them Carbonari, had demonstrated a readiness to compromise with the absolute monarchs. They had distrusted democrats and republicans who sought to achieve Italian unification by political revolution and force of arms. Among these were the Adelfi, a secret society of the followers of Filippo Buonarroti. Ultimately, the task of organizing new cadres of democratic and republican opponents of the restoration governments fell to Giuseppe Mazzini, scion of a bourgeois and Jacobin family of Genoa. Exiled in 1830 at the age of 25, Mazzini turned away from both Carboneria and Buonarrotism and established his own organization, Giovine Italia (Young Italy). Republican and unionist, Mazzini’s organization emphasized popular participation in the national struggle but eschewed Jacobin and social-revolutionary objectives. In 1833–34 the first abortive Mazzinian uprisings took place in Piedmont and Genoa. The latter was organized by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who then fled to France. In 1834 the Austrian police identified as many as 2,000 adherents of Young Italy in Lombardy. In 1836 Mazzini, who had established relationships with democratic revolutionaries in other countries and cofounded Giovine Europa (Young Europe), left Switzerland and settled in London.

Mazzini, GiuseppeGiuseppe Mazzini, detail of an oil painting by Luigi Zuccoli, 1865; in the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan.Courtesy of the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan

Conservative repression convinced the moderates of the futility of conspiracies with limited membership and of the necessity to educate the public about the need for change. Meanwhile, the peace imposed on Italy from 1831 to 1848 favoured economic development, which came in varying degrees everywhere except in the south. There the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies remained backward, and the growth of bourgeois landownership that resulted from the division of great aristocratic holdings did nothing to change the situation. Thus, the imbalance between north and south, to be felt even more strongly after unification, continued to increase. Meanwhile, Genoa, Turin, and Milan began to lay the foundation for becoming important European financial and industrial centres. Piedmontese and Lombard manufacturing and banking expanded rapidly. In Venetia important land-reclamation projects were completed, and in Tuscany banking and commerce flourished, especially via the port of Livorno. Throughout the country the construction of a railroad network beginning in the 1840s increased commerce and gave rise to subsidiary industries.

Economic revival made it more difficult for governments to tighten police control. In Milan, Carlo Cattaneo’s journal, Il politecnico (“The Polytechnic”), founded in 1839, argued that the progress of science and technology necessary to fuel economic growth depended upon government reforms. In the same year, a congress of Italian scientists held its first annual meeting in Pisa. Through 1847 each subsequent meeting assumed a markedly more nationalistic character. Thus, conditions became more favourable for moderates to realize their programs of increasing public education and abolishing censorship and police surveillance. In the cause of economic unification they endeavoured to standardize tolls and trade practices and to increase cultural exchange among the Italian states. They also sought to achieve representative institutions compatible with Italian traditions and with Roman Catholicism.

Vincenzo Gioberti, the most important exponent of liberal Catholicism, envisioned a new and positive role for the temporal power of the papacy. His Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843; “On the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians”) affirmed the idea of progress as the return of the material to the spiritual, of man to God. Because such progress could be realized only through the mediation of the church, Gioberti advocated an Italian federation free from Austrian hegemony and under the nominal presidency of the pope. His ideas were influential among the clergy and most Catholic intellectuals. Under different formulations, this new papalist movement was advanced by Cesare Balbo, Niccolò Tommaseo, and Antonio Rosmini-Serbati.

In the early 1840s, renewed Mazzinian attempts at armed rebellion were ruthlessly suppressed. Among these was the Calabrian expedition of 1844, organized by the Venetian Bandiera brothers and seven of their companions, who were captured and executed by the Bourbon regime. These violent acts of suppression increased the esteem that governments and the general public felt for the moderate opposition. The election of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti as Pope Pius IX in 1846 augured well for the Papal States; his nomination derived from anti-Austrian feeling in the Curia. In the beginning of his reign, he showed liberal sympathies and granted amnesty to political prisoners. He gradually removed the most reactionary prelates from important government posts, permitted the publication of political periodicals, and finally, in 1847, established a council of state. Although only advisory, the council gave the laity a voice in the affairs of state. Influenced by the pope’s liberalism, rulers elsewhere in Italy introduced reforms. Especially important was the Tuscan press law of 1847, by which Grand Duke Leopold II removed most forms of political censorship. The reforms encouraged extremism, however, and the reactionary powers of Europe became convinced that the stability of Italy was in jeopardy. In July 1847 Austrian troops occupied the papal city of Ferrara. This intervention stimulated cooperation among Italian rulers, including Charles Albert of Savoy, whose relations with Austria had been particularly strained. While the rulers discussed reforms—especially the formation of an all-Italian customs union—and the measures needed to cope with famine in several regions, the populace began to stir. The Revolutions of 1848

The first of the Revolutions of 1848 erupted in Palermo on January 9. Starting as a popular insurrection, it soon took on overtones of Sicilian separatism and spread throughout the island. Piecemeal reforms proved inadequate to satisfy the revolutionaries, both noble and bourgeois, who were determined to have a new and more liberal constitution. Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the first to grant one (January 29, 1848). Other rulers were compelled to follow his example: Leopold II on February 17, Charles Albert on March 4, and Pope Pius IX on March 14. The Austrian government, on the other hand, did not yield to popular pressure. Instead, it reinforced its garrisons in Lombardy-Venetia, arrested opposition leaders in Venice and Milan, and suppressed student demonstrations in the university cities of Padua and Pavia. By March 22–23, when revolution had also reached Budapest and Vienna, Venetian and Milanese insurgents moved to depose their Austrian overlords. Within a few days the Austrian army lost nearly all of Lombardy-Venetia and retreated into the Quadrilateral (the region between Mantua, Peschiera, Verona, and Legnago).

On March 23 Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont declared war on Austria. It was a risky decision, but prospects for a national war seemed promising, and he wanted to seize the initiative to preclude republican and democratic domination of the insurgency. After annexing Parma and Modena, whose rulers had been driven out by insurgents, the Piedmontese won a few more victories before suffering reverses. Pius IX, Leopold II, and Ferdinand II, all of whom had initially sent troops to northern Italy to support the Piedmontese army, hastily withdrew their forces. The pope’s address to the cardinals on April 29 revealed his reluctance to back national movements against Austria and did much to discredit him among patriots. Lombardy and Venetia, though not without internal opposition, accepted merger with Piedmont. Nevertheless, the Piedmontese army was unable to withstand the Austrian counteroffensive. After a series of defeats, Charles Albert’s forces withdrew from Milan and on August 6 left the city and its insurgents to the mercy of the returning Austrians. Accusations of royal treachery, formulated by Lombard democrats at that moment, long survived in Italian political debates. By the terms of the Salasco armistice (August 9, 1848), the Piedmontese army abandoned Lombardy. In Piedmont the new constitution, the Statuto Albertino (Albertine Statute), remained in force, and democratic ideas survived.

Throughout Europe the forces of reaction were triumphant. The Revolutions of 1848 were suppressed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Paris. In Naples the king regained power in a coup on May 15 and went on to reconquer Sicily. Meanwhile, in Rome the papacy reintroduced a range of obscurantist policies. Venice, however, under the dictatorship of Daniele Manin, refused to accept the Salasco armistice and resisted the Austrian siege. Leopold II of Tuscany took refuge in the Bourbon fortress of Gaeta in February 1849, when the democrats Giuseppe Montanelli and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi were on the verge of taking control of the government and proclaiming an Italian constituent assembly. In Rome the minister Pellegrino Rossi, a former member of the Carbonari who had promoted conciliatory policies after returning from exile in France, was assassinated on November 15, 1848. This event triggered a democratic insurgency and caused Pius IX to flee to the safety of Gaeta. A constituent assembly elected by universal male suffrage proclaimed the Roman Republic on February 5, 1849.

The Italian revolution seemed to have been reborn. However, Charles Albert, pressed by Piedmontese democrats to resume his war with Austria (March 20, 1849), saw his army routed at Novara three days later. On the same day, March 23, he abdicated and went into exile. His successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was granted an honourable armistice because the Austrians did not want a weakened Savoy monarchy that could be exploited to the advantage of its democratic opponents. The defeat of Piedmont made the position of the democratic and republican opposition untenable in other parts of Italy as well. In Tuscany moderates recalled the grand duke, whose Austrian protectors crushed an insurrection in radical Livorno (May 1849). In Lombardy the Austrian reconquest of Brescia in March, after 10 days of fighting, left Venice isolated, though the city resisted enemy forces until August. The Roman Republic, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi, held out until July 3 against a French army sent by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the new president of the French Republic (later the emperor Napoleon III), whose restoration of the papacy repaid his Roman Catholic supporters. The returning sovereigns rapidly set about abrogating constitutions, disbanding parliaments, and, especially in the south, filling the prisons. Unification The role of Piedmont

In Piedmont Victor Emmanuel II governed with a parliament whose democratic majority refused to ratify the peace treaty with Austria. This was an exception to the general course of reaction. The skillfully worded Proclamation of Moncalieri (November 20, 1849) favourably contrasted Victor Emmanuel’s policies with those of other Italian rulers and permitted elections. The victorious Liberals installed a new cabinet under Massimo d’Azeglio, a moderate trusted by the king. D’Azeglio introduced the Siccardi law, which curtailed the power of ecclesiastical courts. In October 1850 another prominent moderate, Camillo Benso di Cavour, entered the cabinet and directed a laissez-faire economic policy. He formulated international commercial treaties and drew on foreign capital to reduce the public debt, stimulate economic growth, and develop a railroad system. Cavour’s dynamism alarmed conservatives and even d’Azeglio. In 1852, through an alliance with centre-left deputies that became known as the connubio (“marriage”), Cavour displaced d’Azeglio as head of the cabinet. Despite disagreements with the king (who favoured the clerical party and occasionally displayed absolutist tendencies), Cavour introduced various ecclesiastical, judicial, and fiscal reforms.

Victor Emmanuel II.Alinari/Art Resource, New York

A number of events promoted Piedmont’s prestige in Italy and abroad. In March 1854 France and England intervened in support of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War. To obtain Austrian support, they were prepared to guarantee the status quo in Italy. Only Piedmont was in a position to disrupt it at that time, and Cavour negotiated an alliance with the Western powers. In May he sent to Crimea an army that performed brilliantly. As a result, Piedmont was able to assume a place among the victors at the Congress of Paris (February 1856). From this platform Cavour, achieving a diplomatic coup for Piedmont and Italy, declared that the only threat to peace in Italy, and the root cause of subversive plots, was the burdensome Austrian overlordship. Cavour’s pronouncements at the congress increased the standing of Piedmont among nationalists.

Meanwhile, Mazzini’s democratic and republican movement was crumbling. In February 1853 an insurrection against the Austrians failed in Milan. The discovery and execution at Belfiore (1852–53) of the leaders of a conspiracy in Mantua, as well as abortive insurrections in Cadore and Lunigiana, discredited the democratic movement and discouraged its most dedicated adherents. Mazzini faced complete isolation for his support of an expedition to the southern mainland to incite insurrection, known as the Sapri expedition (June–July 1857), in which the Neapolitan republican and socialist Carlo Pisacane and some 300 companions lost their lives. The democrats were divided and unable to carry on the revolutionary struggle; nothing was to be expected from the restored governments. In Lombardy-Venetia, Austria carried out stern repressive measures. Pius IX, now under the influence of the reactionary Giacomo Cardinal Antonelli, refused to grant any reforms in Rome. Liberal Catholicism could not remain viable without reforms in the Papal States. In Naples and the duchies, reaction became pervasive, although the grand duke of Tuscany sought to make his subjects forget that he owed his throne to Austrian military intervention. Only in Piedmont was there any hope left for the reformers. The war of 1859

In 1857 Italian nationalists founded the monarchist-unionist Italian National Society, which supported the policies of Cavour. Under the presidency of Manin and the vice presidency of Garibaldi, the society achieved wider appeal than it would have achieved under the exclusive leadership of moderates. Although he did not outlaw conspiratorial movements, Cavour was determined to solve the Italian question by international politics rather than by revolution. At a secret conference held at Plombières, France, in July 1858 he arranged with Emperor Napoleon III for French military intervention in the event of Austrian aggression against Piedmont. Cavour’s goal was the complete expulsion of Austrian troops from the peninsula. In return for this help Piedmont had to cede Savoy and the county of Nice to France and outlaw the Mazzinian movement; wrongly, Napoleon III held Mazzini’s followers responsible for an attempt on his life made by the anarchist Felice Orsini in Paris on January 14, 1859. Despite that event, a Franco-Piedmontese alliance was sealed in January 1859. With Napoleon’s approval, Victor Emmanuel II made a speech from his throne in which he declared himself ready to hear “il grido di dolore” (“the cry of woe”) against Austrian oppression that arose from every part of Italy.

Meanwhile, the Austrian military leadership and its sympathizers at court urged Emperor Francis Joseph to declare war on Piedmont. On April 23 an insulting and unacceptable ultimatum demanded the demobilization of Piedmontese troops. Piedmont rejected the ultimatum, and Austria declared war three days later. As Cavour had hoped and planned, France honoured its alliance with Piedmont. In June 1859 the allies won bloody battles at Magenta, Solferino, and San Martino. But, with the Austrian army in retreat, Napoleon III suddenly signed an armistice with the Austrians at Villafranca. This sudden change of policy responded partly to the outcry of French public opinion against the loss of life in the Italian campaign and partly to events in Italy itself, where political unification seemed imminent. On April 27 insurgents had overthrown Leopold II of Tuscany, and moderate political leaders headed by Baron Bettino Ricasoli had formed a provisional government. In June Parma, Modena, and the Papal Legations (the northern Papal States) had rebelled. Only in the Marche and Umbria were papal troops able to suppress the insurgents. Plebiscites in the liberated states urged unification with Piedmont, but France opposed the creation of a powerful new state on its border.

At Villafranca Napoleon III received Lombardy from Austria, which he passed, in turn, to Piedmont. He also agreed that the deposed rulers of Modena and Tuscany would be restored to power and, along with Austria, permitted to join an Italian confederation. In response to this political defeat, Cavour resigned in July 1859 and was replaced by Urbano Rattazzi. Britain, however, opposed the restoration of conservative governments in Modena and Tuscany, and Napoleon III, with his position at home strengthened by the acquisition of Savoy and Nice, reconsidered his position. As a result, Cavour’s policy prevailed, and he returned to office on January 21, 1860. New plebiscites in the duchies and the Papal Legations reconfirmed popular sentiment in favour of union with Piedmont. It was fear of a democratic revolution, a desire to weaken Austria, and Britain’s wish for a strong Italian state as a counterweight to French influence that induced the Western powers to assist Piedmont in obtaining this great success. Garibaldi and the Thousand

The democratic movement refused to consider the national revolution in any way complete so long as parts of the peninsula remained under the old sovereigns. Sicily, where autonomist opposition to the Bourbon government was endemic and extreme, was the most obvious place for a democratic revival. In April 1860 a Mazzinian-inspired insurrection broke out in Palermo (the Gancia revolt), and, although it was quickly quelled, it spread throughout the island. After the insurrection, Sicilian democrats demonstrated that they could overcome their deep divisions of ideology and class. In May they had the opportunity to assist Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, a volunteer force that had set sail from Liguria to free the Italian south from Bourbon rule.

Despite scant preparations and a shortage of weapons, Garibaldi’s volunteers landed at Marsala on May 11, 1860, and in less than three months conquered the entire island of Sicily. Garibaldi’s daring and skill and the indigenous revolutionary ferment accounted for the success of the expedition. Still, the attitude of the Sicilian peasants was ambivalent. They initially welcomed the invading force but then quickly became disillusioned at Garibaldi’s reluctance to order the breakup of secular, landed estates. Although Garibaldi declared on May 14 that he ruled “in the name of Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy,” he entrusted the Sicilian provisional government to his associate, Francesco Crispi, who came into serious conflict with Cavour’s emissaries on the island. Cavour feared the implications of a republican coup d’état. Meanwhile, as the European powers attempted mediation, the new king of the Two Sicilies, Francis II, granted a constitution and promised amnesty to Sicilian rebels. At this point, without the consent of Victor Emmanuel II and perhaps even against his wishes, Garibaldi crossed the Strait of Messina on August 19, 1860, and by September 7 made a triumphant entry into Naples. Francis II fled to Gaeta, and on October 1 the last serious resistance of the Bourbon army collapsed at the Battle of the Volturno, near Caserta.

The unification of Italy. The dates are those of annexation, first to Sardinia-Piedmont and after 1861 to the Kingdom of Italy.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The prestige of Garibaldi and the democrats had risen so high that Cavour felt compelled to seize the initiative once again. Having persuaded Napoleon III to limit his opposition to lodging a perfunctory protest, Cavour proceeded to occupy the central Papal States (Umbria and the Marche). Rome and its surrounding region (Lazio) remained under papal rule, but the remainder of the Italian peninsula, apart from Austrian Venetia, became one kingdom under a moderate constitution. On October 26, 1860, Victor Emmanuel II met with Garibaldi on Neapolitan soil and was greeted as “king of Italy.” During October and November, plebiscites in the former papal and Bourbon provinces overwhelmingly endorsed annexation to the Kingdom of Italy.

Papal States, 1815–70The Papal States in 1815 (left) and at their annexation by Italy in 1870.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Kingdom of Italy was officially proclaimed on March 17, 1861, by a parliament assembled in Turin. Soon afterward Cavour asserted that Rome must become the capital of the new state within a context of separation between secular and religious authority. However, with Cavour’s untimely death on June 6, 1861, the Roman Question remained unresolved.

Central Hall of the Carignano Palace, in Turin, Italy, the seat of Italy's first parliament.City of Turin Kit Condition of the Italian kingdom

In 1861 the kingdom had 26 million inhabitants, 78 percent of whom were illiterate. With some 70 percent of the adult population engaged in agriculture, it seemed unlikely that Italy could achieve the economic progress that other European countries were making in that period. The group winning the majority in parliament in 1861 was from the moderate-conservative right. The coalition principally united a Piedmontese group, which was led by Giovanni Lanza and Quintino Sella and controlled manufacturing and banks, with Ricasoli’s Tuscan group, which was interested in commerce and transportation. This elite alliance wanted a centralized government structure that would allow parliament, and hence the executive branch, to control local administration, especially where there was any danger of democratic predominance. By a series of laws enacted in 1865, these moderate notables effected legislative unification and established firm central control over the provinces and the communes through the appointment of handpicked regional prefects. Their democratic opposition, preoccupied with the issue of bringing Rome and Venetia into the new state, offered little resistance to these centralizing and authoritarian tendencies.

The kingdom’s centralized government intensified the serious economic imbalance between north and south. The free-trade policy of the moderate governments ruined or badly harmed the weak and unprotected industries of the south, especially woolen-cloth manufacturing in the Salerno area, which the Bourbon government had previously sheltered. Moreover, railroad construction in southern regions was beset with corruption in the issuance of contracts. Relief for the poor and public education remained miserably inadequate. Naples, the largest city in Italy in 1861, with about 447,000 inhabitants to Turin’s 205,000, was plagued with poverty and disease.

Poverty was most acute and widespread in rural areas, where peasant families had gained nothing from the partial division of large feudal estates. Many peasants espoused an especially violent form of brigandage, which, though fomented and often assisted by emissaries of the exiled Francis II, was a form of class warfare against the agrarian bourgeoisie. Men on horseback occupied villages in the south, killed Liberals, and raised the white flag of the Bourbon kingdom. The government sent some 116,000 soldiers—two-fifths of the entire Italian army—to the south to combat this lawlessness. The army’s savage action resulted in the execution of at least 5,000 peasants under laws that established special tribunals to deal with the “emergency.” Even so, the government did not bring brigandage under control until 1865.

In the country at large, the public remained preoccupied with completing territorial unification. The democrats, who were most interested in solving the Roman Question, saw an opportunity to act in March 1862 when Urbano Rattazzi replaced Bettino Ricasoli as prime minister. Garibaldi assembled a volunteer force in July and August and began a march from the south into Lazio and Rome. Fearful of Austrian reaction and of a military confrontation with the French garrison in Rome, Rattazzi mobilized the regular army. Garibaldi was wounded in the ensuing fighting and was arrested on August 29, 1862, at Aspromonte in Calabria. The subsequent public outrage brought down Rattazzi’s government. In 1864 Marco Minghetti, another moderate, negotiated the September Convention, a compromise that required French troops to withdraw from Rome in exchange for an Italian pledge to respect the pope’s temporal sovereignty and to remain out of Rome. A secret clause in the agreement also bound Italy to transfer its capital from Turin to Florence, thus implicitly abandoning Cavour’s claim to Rome. When this clause became known, severe riots in Turin (September 21–22) left 30 people dead and caused the fall of the Minghetti government. The acquisition of Venetia and Rome

Two years later, in June 1866, the outbreak of war between Austria and Prussia diverted attention from Rome to Venetia. The Italian government of Alfonso La Marmora, under the terms of an alliance with Prussia, attacked Austrian-held Venetia when Prussia attacked Austria from the north, but the Italians met defeat both on land at Custoza (June 24) and at sea near Lissa (July 20). In July Garibaldi led a band of volunteers who cooperated with regular army units to achieve some moderate success near Trento, but the government ordered him to withdraw when Austria and Germany concluded an armistice. Through the mediation of Napoleon III, Italy obtained Venetia in the Treaty of Vienna (October 3, 1866). In the spring of 1867, Rattazzi returned to power and permitted Garibaldi to station volunteers along the papal border. However, a renewed attempt to march on Rome merely brought back French troops, who defeated Garibaldi at Mentana on November 3. Arrested once again, he was sentenced to house arrest on the remote island of Caprera, between Sardinia and Corsica, where he owned some property. Italy suffered a marked loss of prestige politically and militarily, and the internal situation was far from favourable. Separatist revolts occurred in Palermo in 1866. In 1869 Parma and other cities rose in rebellion against the macinato (“grist tax”) and other taxes levied to finance the reorganization of the armed forces.

The Lanza-Sella government, formed in December 1869, was perhaps the most typical among the centre-right cabinets of this period. It repressed Mazzinian opposition, advocated free trade, and was cautious in foreign affairs, although, in its careful subservience to France, it nearly acquiesced to the king’s desire to intervene in the Franco-German War.

Yet, despite its lack of brilliance, the Lanza-Sella government resolved the Roman Question. Napoleon III’s defeat and abdication deprived the pope of French military protection. Therefore, on September 20, 1870, following a token armed resistance by the papal army, Italian troops breached the city’s walls at Porta Pia and entered Rome. Refusing to accept Italy’s occupation of the city, Pius IX withdrew and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican palace, a position that his successors maintained until 1929. Marino Berengo Clara M. Lovett John Foot Italy from 1870 to 1945 Developments from 1870 to 1914 Politics and the political system, 1870–87

After the conquest of Rome in 1870, Italian politicians settled down to manage the economy, to build up the country’s military power, and—in the telling phrase of the Piedmontese author and statesman Massimo d’Azeglio—to “make Italians.” Popular disaffection remained high, especially because of the grist tax that had been introduced in 1869. Governments of the right remained in office, first under Giovanni Lanza (to 1873) and then under Marco Minghetti (1873–76). The right was not an organized party but a group of patriotic, mostly northern landowners committed to a strong currency and free trade. Under both prime ministers the main domestic task was to balance the budget. Minghetti eventually managed this, but raising taxes and squeezing expenditure made the right unpopular, and its candidates did badly in the 1874 elections. In March 1876 the Minghetti government fell when its Tuscan supporters refused to support a state takeover of the railways.

Italy was then ruled for many years by governments of the left, which were usually led by Agostino Depretis (until his death in 1887). The deputies of the left, heirs of the Risorgimento’s democratic tradition, were more anticlerical, more frequently members of the middle class (many of them were lawyers), more often from the south, and less concerned about the value of money than the rentier right had been. They were, however, splintered into various groups, and factional disputes became endemic. Left governments abolished the grist tax (1883) and made two years’ primary education compulsory (1877).

A main achievement of the left was the widening of suffrage in 1882. The voting age was reduced to 21 (from 25); the requirement to pay 40 lire in direct taxes per annum was halved and was abolished altogether for those with two years’ schooling. The electorate thus increased from approximately 500,000 to 2,000,000 men, including now many urban artisans, especially in the north, where schools were more common. Within a few years modern political parties were founded and won seats in northern Italy, but southern constituencies remained dominated by elite groups of lawyers and local notables, often linked to prominent landowners.

Local government was also very significant, and there were often bitter disputes among local factions. The 8,300-odd municipalities (comuni) were in charge of primary schools and most welfare services, raised much of their own revenue, and appointed their own staff. The central government tried to control them by appointing the mayors and also by giving veto powers over municipal decisions to provincial bodies that were strongly influenced by the provincial prefect, a government appointee. The prefect frequently dissolved councils for alleged financial or legal abuses and replaced them with a government “commissioner” until new elections were held, but these dissolutions often occurred when council leaders opposed government candidates at parliamentary elections. However, government attempts to control local government were never really successful. The prefects had to ensure that government candidates would win the next parliamentary elections, and so they had to conciliate, not bully, local elites, including the mayors and municipal councillors. Corruption was therefore often left unchecked. National governments became remarkably dependent on local power holders. Depretis himself won over (“transformed”) deputies and kept his governments in office by distributing patronage and favours to local notables.

Trasformismo (“transformism”) became the normal way of conducting parliamentary business, for there were few serious disputes among the leading politicians. Virtually all of them accepted the constitutional settlement of 1861, and few disputed foreign and colonial policy, which, in any case, was conducted by foreign ministers and prime ministers without much reference to parliament. In 1881 the French occupation of Tunisia alarmed the government, and the following year, to avoid diplomatic isolation, Italy joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. This was essentially a defensive alliance guaranteeing German and Austrian support against any attack by France, Italy’s main rival in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Italy embarked on its first real colonial ventures, the takeover of the Red Sea ports of Asseb and Massawa (both now in Eritrea) in 1885. Southern politicians favoured colonial expansion as an outlet for surplus population and agricultural produce; northern ones wanted Italy to be a great power, saw the army as an essential guarantor of public order, and supported high military spending—the army and navy ministries spent more than all other ministries combined between 1862 and 1913. Forces of opposition

The political elite may have agreed on most issues, but there was plenty of opposition in the country. Most men owned guns, and violent crime was common. There were 3,000 murders a year, many of them a result of vendettas or blood feuds. Brigands were still active in parts of the southern mainland in the 1870s, and banditry was still common in the mountainous zones of Sardinia. In the towns, rioting was frequent; more than 250 people were killed in riots against the grist tax in 1869, and similar riots against local taxes or for land and jobs continued well into the 20th century. The strikes of the 1880s—especially by organized agricultural labourers in Mantua province—much alarmed respectable opinion. Anarchists were active in the Romagna and parts of the south and occasionally attempted to carry out insurrections, as at Matese in 1877, or to kill the king, as Giovanni Passanante attempted to do in 1878.

However, the anarchist leader in the Romagna, Andrea Costa, soon converted to socialist ideas. In 1881 he founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna (later the Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party), which preached eventual revolution but also agitated for such causes as universal suffrage and labour and welfare legislation; in 1882, under the new suffrage, Costa became Italy’s first socialist deputy. In Lombardy a moderate, labour-oriented Italian Workers’ Party, founded in 1885, helped to organize the Po valley peasantry into “leagues” and labour cooperatives. The northern labour movement—unions, mutual aid societies, and cooperatives—adopted either revolutionary or reformist socialist ideas. Reformist local councils began to be elected in central Italy, first in Imola and then in other small agricultural towns.

Republican opposition also survived, particularly in central Italy, long after Mazzini’s death in 1872. Republicans ran many of the mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They opposed strikes, nationalizations, and the class struggle but strongly favoured social protective legislation and civil rights. Some of them, including Matteo Renato Imbriani, also advocated an active irredentist foreign policy—that is, a policy that aimed to liberate Italians living in foreign territory; in particular they wanted to wrest Trento and Trieste from Austrian control. They considered the Triple Alliance and colonial expansionism inimical to Italian interests and expressions of Italy’s monarchical and conservative political institutions.

Perhaps the most serious opposition force in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Risorgimento had deprived the church of the Papal States, including Rome itself, and of much of its income. The church had lost its previous virtual monopoly of education and welfare, and compulsory state education was deliberately secular. Many religious orders had been disbanded; monasteries and convents had become public buildings, used by the state. In the south particularly, ecclesiastical organization had relied heavily on monks and friars and could barely continue to function. Bishops needed royal approval, which was often refused, to receive their revenues and take up their posts. The state’s Law of Guarantees of 1871 permitted the pope himself to retain only the Vatican and Lateran palaces as well as Castel Gandolfo. Pius IX denounced the new usurping state, forbade Catholics to vote in parliamentary elections or to become candidates, and appointed a new generation of “intransigent” bishops. New laymen’s organizations were founded; the Opera dei Congressi, with committees at parish level, became the focus of Catholic resistance to the new state. It organized cooperatives, welfare insurance, credit banks and mutual aid societies, as well as a host of local journals and campaigns against liberal secular proposals (such as a divorce law). Church and state remained mutually suspicious, particularly in the Veneto region, where the Catholic social movement effectively mobilized regionalist opposition to centralizing government and peasant hostility to landlords and free trade. Land reform

The main issue of political debate in late 19th-century Italy was land ownership. Liberal governments insisted that the municipalities should sell off most of the common land to private owners—at least 740,000 ac (300,000 ha) were sold by 1880 in southern Italy alone, and more was occupied illegally. Another 1,250,000 ac (500,000 ha) of ecclesiastical estates were similarly sold, often at extremely low prices. Overall, at least 5,000,000 ac (2,000,000 ha) were transferred. In some regions, including Piedmont, Liguria, and Sardinia, the sales did create a “property-owning democracy”; that is, a large number of rural people became small landowners, albeit with scattered strips that made improvement unprofitable. The sales also introduced people to the market economy, because they had to repay their mortgages in cash and find money for high land taxes. Small-scale ownership did not become common in most other regions, despite the land sales. Peasants who did acquire land were often forced to sell it again to meet tax debts or interest payments. However, land transfers did often create a non-noble rural middle class that owned an adequate amount of land or extensive flocks and could dominate local politics; this was particularly true in the former Papal States of central Italy.

Privatization of the commons also had serious environmental and social consequences. Much common land was woodland, bought up and felled by speculators who sold timber to railway companies (for sleepers) or to mines (for roof support). Deforestation became widespread; Sardinia, for example, lost four-fifths of its trees in the 19th century. The results included soil erosion, landslides, stagnant water in valley bottoms, and increased malaria—the greatest scourge of rural Italy, which in turn prevented much fertile low-lying land from being cultivated. Furthermore, the state also abolished traditional rights such as grazing and wood gathering on the remaining unsold common land. Millions of households that had relied on access to this land to obtain fuel for heating and cooking or pasture for their pigs were suddenly forced either to suffer real poverty or to break the law. Protectionism

Most agricultural land in Italy produced grain, especially wheat. In the early 1880s world wheat prices fell by one-third, and the incomes of the larger and more prosperous farmers (who grew for the market rather than for their own consumption) collapsed. As landowners were the most powerful pressure group in the country and were strongly represented in parliament, the government could not resist their demands for protectionism.

The most prominent wool and cotton manufacturers of northern Italy also favoured tariff protection, and these industries were second only to the silk industry in importance and numbers employed. Some tariff protection (up to 40 percent) had, in fact, already been given to textiles and other light industries in 1878, but employers naturally wanted more, particularly after the restoration of gold convertibility in 1883 in effect revalued the lira. Moreover, in the 1880s Italy also gained a steel industry (Terni Steelworks, founded 1886), which was designed to build warships and railways but was sold to subsidized industries and was itself unable to survive without protection. All this meant the rise of a strong protectionist lobby, representing large landowners and textile manufacturers and linked to powerful steel and naval interests. Social changes

In 1871 there were 26.8 million Italians. Both birth and death rates were high, and almost half the children born alive died before age five. Large-scale transatlantic emigration began in the 1880s; in 1888 alone more than 200,000 Italians went to the Americas in search of jobs, 10 times as many as a decade previously. The most popular destinations were Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Most emigrants in this early phase, whether bound for the Americas or for other parts of Europe, were northerners, often seasonal migrants from hill and mountain areas of peasant ownership, where jobs were scarce and where younger sons who stayed behind had little prospect of marriage. But even in 1888 more than a quarter of the emigrants were southerners, and the great exodus of southern emigrants to both North and South America was just about to begin. Most people (nearly 70 percent in 1871) were illiterate and usually spoke only dialect. The compulsory schooling law of 1877 was widely ignored in practice; in any case, it provided for only two years of schooling, not enough to guarantee the ability to read and count. Conscripts were likely to be taught to read during military service, but only one-fourth of the age group was actually called up into the army. Italian education was more successful at the secondary level in the towns, where the “technical schools” and “technical institutes” taught science, engineering, and accounting and had high prestige among urban parents. As for the universities, they mainly trained lawyers and doctors, both professions in which supply considerably exceeded demand. The Crispi era, 1887–1900 Domestic policies

On the death of Depretis in 1887 the Sicilian and former Mazzinian Francesco Crispi became prime minister and pursued a policy of administrative reforms at home and expansion abroad. His main domestic achievement was to extend suffrage at local elections to all males over age 21 who paid five lire per annum in local taxes—that is, to 3.5 million people. This was a real blow to the local notables who had previously controlled local government. The larger councils (after 1896, all councils) were also permitted to choose their own mayors and were required to meet in public. The Crispi government also brought in a reasonably effective system of administrative law for the first time, through the provincial councils (giunte) and the Council of State. The government reformed the charities, excluded the clergy from running them, and often diverted the funds to more-secular purposes. The minister of justice, Giuseppe Zanardelli, promulgated a new code of criminal law that abolished the death penalty and legalized strikes unless violence or intimidation occurred.

However, the most important act of Crispi’s first government was the new tariff of 1887. It was a response to demands from northern steel and textile interests, from farmers (also mainly from the north) who faced imports of cheap American grain or Asian rice, and from social reformers eager to secure legislative measures that employers could afford. A duty of 50 lire per ton was placed on imported wheat by 1888, and later it went higher still; food prices rose sharply, provoking considerable unrest. Similar measures protected steel, shipbuilding, and textiles. Italy’s largest trading partner was France, and the French retaliated against Italian goods. A “tariff war” between the two countries lasted until 1898. Franco-Italian trade was more than halved, and entire sectors of Italian agriculture, including wine, silk, cattle, and olive oil, collapsed overnight as their markets were cut off. When excess food supplies drove all agricultural prices down, even grain growers failed to benefit from the new tariff. Moreover, the crisis helped to drag down many of Italy’s banks, including one of the largest, the Banca Romana. Resulting inquiries revealed that the bank had made interest-free loans to leading politicians, including Crispi himself and former treasury minister Giovanni Giolitti, who was prime minister from May 1892 to November 1893. Politicians needed the money to finance their election expenses and to run or bribe newspapers. The Banca Romana scandal of 1893 was the first of many famous Italian corruption scandals, and, like the others, it discredited the whole political system. Colonialism

Crispi’s colonial policy brought additional blows. The Italian settlement at Massawa soon provoked conflict with Ethiopia, which claimed Massawa as part of its own territory and whose forces in 1887 killed 500 Italian troops at Dogali. The two countries made peace at Wichale in 1889, and Crispi expanded the Italian possessions along the Red Sea to include most of present-day Eritrea and along the Indian Ocean coast to include eastern and southern Somalia. In 1895 the Italians annexed a large portion of the Ethiopian province of Tigray, and war with Ethiopia began again. In March 1896 the Ethiopians overwhelmed the Italian army at the Battle of Adwa (Adua), killing about 5,000 Italian troops. This disaster forced Crispi to resign and ended Italy’s colonial adventures for some years. It was widely seen in Italy as a disgrace to the whole political system and to Italy’s aspirations to great-power status; it would have to be avenged in the future. Years of crisis

Economic hardship and political corruption at home, together with military failure abroad, provoked riots and uprisings throughout the country. In the early 1890s the fasci siciliani" class="md-crosslink">fasci siciliani (Sicilian peasant leagues organized by socialists and others) led successful strikes and land occupations until Crispi, in January 1894, used the army to restore order. The fasci’s leaders were imprisoned, and the movement soon collapsed. At the same time, the government also suppressed an anarchist insurrection in Lunigiana by martial law. Further riots occurred in 1898, mainly in cities and towns, over civil liberties and the high price of bread. Shortly after troops killed hundreds of rioters in Milan, King Umberto I decorated their commander, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris. Governments also exercised repression by attempting to govern without parliament, as Crispi did in 1895; by dissolving opposition associations and unions, as the government of the marchese di Rudinì, Antonio Starabba, did in 1897; and by attempting to restrict civil liberties by royal decree, without parliamentary approval, as the governments of both Rudinì and Luigi Pelloux tried to do in 1898–99. Socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists protested against this authoritarian rule both inside and outside parliament. In 1899 Socialist deputies overturned the parliamentary ballot box to block the passage of a measure.

Repression resulted in a constitutional crisis. Conservative politicians, notably Sidney Sonnino in 1897, argued that the Italian parliament was corrupt and unfit to govern and that the king should provide strong executive rule, according to the letter of the 1848 Statuto (constitution). Most moderate Liberals rejected this argument. The campaign for constitutional government was led by Felice Cavallotti and the Radical group in parliament, who in the 1890s strongly denounced bank scandals, tariff protectionism, colonial wars, and the Triple Alliance. The Radicals were a northern, anticlerical, moralistic group that denounced the corruption of the south (Crispi was the first southern prime minister), of the monarchy, and of the Roman establishment and strongly favoured wider civil liberties and army reform. In 1900, after months of bitter parliamentary dispute and obstructionism, Pelloux called a general election to resolve the constitutional issue, in which the left triumphed; the Radicals won 34 seats, and their allies, the Republicans, won a further 28 out of a total of 557. (The two groups had had 51 seats between them in the previous parliament.)

Furthermore, in 1892 a young Milanese lawyer, Filippo Turati, had helped to found the Italian Workers’ Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani), which in 1893 became the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI). The PSI united the various socialist and labour groups of northern and central Italy and Sicily and stood in opposition to the anarchist movement. The new party was mainly social democratic and heavily influenced by the German model. It preached class struggle and aspired to parliamentary representation and state socialism. Formally Marxist, it envisaged a long period of evolution before an eventual “revolutionary” transformation of society. Crispi dissolved the party in 1894, but it revived in the late 1890s and won 32 seats in 1900. While its deputies worked closely with the Radicals to secure constitutional liberties and social reforms, ordinary party members were often much more revolutionary in their aims. Other socialist organizations, such as trade unions and cooperatives, also grew in the 1890s and by 1900 were significant in the newly industrializing economy of northern Italy. They campaigned for concrete short-term gains on wages and working conditions and were usually more reformist than the party. However, the more radical syndicalist movement also began to take hold among various groups of workers and peasants at this time, including dockworkers, marble miners in Tuscany, and peasants in Puglia. These organizations preached revolutionary class struggle and opposed the reformist policies of the Socialist Party leadership. Railway workers, who were also influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, formed their own autonomous union, the Italian Railroad Workers Union (Sindacato Ferrovieri Italiani; SFI), in 1907. Moreover, a syndicalist federation, the Italian Syndical Union (Unione Sindacale Italiana; USI), was founded in 1912. The Giolitti era, 1900–14

The elections of June 1900 marked the defeat of the Pelloux government and of attempts to impose illiberal laws. The following month King Umberto I was assassinated by an Italian anarchist, Gaetano Bresci, who had returned from the United States to “avenge” the victims of the 1898 repression. The new king, Victor Emmanuel III, favoured a return to constitutional government, as did the governments led by Pelloux’s successors, Giuseppe Saracco, Giuseppe Zanardelli, and Giovanni Giolitti, the last of whom was the most frequent holder of the office of prime minister between 1903 and 1914. Giolitti sought to defuse popular discontent by social reforms, the gradual extension of the right to vote, and public works and to conciliate the major organized opposition groups in the country, the Socialists and the Roman Catholics. In 1912 suffrage was extended to nearly the entire adult male population, from 3.3 to 8.6 million men.

In the south, however, Giolitti’s government was less accommodating and often resorted to old-style repression in the face of protest, as in 1903 and 1904. The historian and Socialist Gaetano Salvemini, the fiercest critic of Giolitti’s strategy toward the south, accused the government of corruption and of doing nothing to alleviate poverty. Salvemini’s pamphlet, first published in 1909 and later collected as Il ministro della mala vita (1919; “The Ministry of Evil”), encapsulated this position. Giolitti also embarked on a colonialist war with Turkey in 1911, with the support of the church and the new nationalist movement. Italy conquered Libya and the Greek-speaking Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. Both territories became Italian possessions in 1912 and remained so until World War II. Domestic policies

The social reforms passed in these years included laws that prohibited child labour, established a compulsory maternity fund and compulsory rest days, and limited the working day of women to 11 hours. Central governments also subsidized municipal welfare schemes such as orphanages and senior citizen housing and encouraged municipal transport, housing, and water and sewage schemes—especially in northern Italy, where the municipalities could afford such innovations. Often these schemes were pioneered by Catholic- or Socialist-dominated local councils, which entrusted the management to their own cooperatives; government approval of “municipal socialism” was much resented by local businessmen, shopkeepers, and others. Moreover, Giolitti’s governments allowed trade unions to operate in relative freedom and generally avoided interfering in private-sector labour disputes. The government’s tolerance of labour organizations was another source of middle-class resentment.

Giolitti enjoyed Radical support, and his governments often included Radical deputies. He also received the tacit support of moderate Socialist deputies and union leaders. Giolitti’s accommodation of labour and Socialists was his way of co-opting the socialist movement and, as he put it, placing “Marx in the attic.” Trade unionism grew rapidly in the new atmosphere after 1900, not only in industry but among the agricultural labourers of the Po valley and Puglia. A land-workers union, the Federation of Agricultural Labourers (Federterra), was formed in 1901, and the various Socialist-led unions formed a confederation of labour in 1906. Some unions depended heavily on public works schemes subsidized by government. Others, such as Federterra, relied on Giolitti’s reform legislation favouring cooperatives and on contracts provided by Socialist councils. All the major Socialist institutions became reliant on government willingness not to repress them. In turn, they abandoned any effort to overthrow the government. However, revolutionary views dominated the Socialist Party membership from 1904 to 1908, which was always more militant than its leaders, especially those in parliament. Moreover, there was also a powerful group of revolutionary syndicalists, who broke away from the Socialist Party in 1907 but retained control of many unions, especially in Liguria and Puglia. This popular militancy ensured that Socialist deputies could not compromise too openly with Giolitti or accept posts in his governments.

Nor could the organized Roman Catholic movement easily make open arrangements with the Giolitti government. The Catholics too had founded trade unions and workers’ cooperatives, as well as mutual aid societies and rural banks, throughout northern Italy in the 1890s. This development followed Pope Leo XIII’s embrace of social concerns in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). In opposition both to socialism and the “excesses of capitalism,” Rerum Novarum called for the organization of Catholics in economic and political life, class conciliation, the creation of small farms, limits on weekend work, and the defense of female workers. Catholic associations were particularly strong among the peasantry of Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Veneto and among the largely female textile workers, and they controlled many local councils. In 1897–98 the Rudinì government dissolved most Catholic associations, but later governments permitted their reestablishment in return for tacit support against socialism. This support even became overt at parliamentary elections; in 1904 and 1909 the papal prohibition on Catholics voting (non expedit) was lifted in many constituencies, and Catholics were permitted to vote for Liberal candidates in order to keep Socialists out. In 1913 antisocialists signed a secret electoral agreement known as the Gentiloni pact, named for the president of the Catholic Electoral Union, Vincenzo Ottorino Gentiloni. The old “intransigents” of the Opera dei Congressi, deeply hostile to a united Italy, were replaced early in the century by a new generation of moderate Catholic leaders favoured by Pius X, who even dissolved the Opera dei Congressi in 1904 and brought the Catholic lay movement under the bishops. The Catholic moderates gave Giolitti their support, but they could not enter government or even operate as a lay party independent of the bishops or the Vatican. Economic developments

Giolitti’s political dominance rested on Italy’s rapid economic growth after the mid-1890s. Industrial production probably doubled between 1896 and 1913. The tariff dispute with France was settled in 1898. Cotton milling remained the largest industry, but by 1914 Italy had also established—for military reasons—a large, protected steel industry, together with extensive shipbuilding yards in Liguria. Big modern metalworking plants opened or expanded in Piombino, Terni, Brescia, Milan, and Genoa. The railways were nationalized in 1905, and this stimulated demand for rolling stock and engines. Hydroelectricity from the Alps provided cheap, renewable energy for the factories of the northwestern “industrial triangle” (Lombardy, Liguria, and Piedmont). Moreover, a major new industry—automobile production—developed, in which Italy did not have to compete against established interests elsewhere. Fiat, founded in Turin in 1899 by Giovanni Agnelli, soon became one of Europe’s largest producers and exporters of automobiles and also made buses, trucks, airplanes, and military vehicles. Lancia was founded in Turin in 1906, and the company that became Alfa Romeo opened in Milan in 1910. Olivetti, founded in 1908 in Ivrea, soon became Europe’s leading producer of typewriters and office machines. The state’s finances were healthy during this period, and the balance of payments was boosted by remittances from the millions of emigrants elsewhere in Europe and in the Americas.

Agriculture, still the dominant sector of the economy, provided jobs for almost 60 percent of employed adults in 1911. It too enjoyed a boom, partly because of state-subsidized land reclamation and irrigation schemes (particularly in the Po valley) and partly because of continued high tariffs on grain imports, which gave ample incentive to produce more food on suitable land. Wheat production rose by about one-third in these years. In central Italy, sugar beet production, another heavily protected sector, stimulated a new refining industry. The Socialists and Catholics founded cooperatives throughout northern and central Italy to help provide seeds and machinery and to market produce, and a network of rural banks provided farmers with much-needed cheap credit.

Economic growth, however, was heavily concentrated in the north. The south languished, and income there was less than half that in the north. The southern economy was arguably linked more closely to northern Europe and South America (to which it exported wine, olive oil, fruit, and labour) than to northern Italy. Southern produce needed markets abroad, and the south was very badly hit by the tariff war with France. Moreover, the positivist school of anthropology, fashionable in the 1890s and later, promoted a widely held view that southerners were more criminal than northerners and even “racially” degenerate—an argument that lent ethnic overtones to the debate on “southern backwardness.”

Southern politicians soon began demanding and, when in office, securing tax relief and development schemes, which provided, among other things, roads, schools, and irrigation. In 1897 the first “special law” provided Italy’s poorest region, Sardinia, with cheaper credit and funds for irrigation and reforestation. Sardinia’s leading politician, Francesco Cocco Ortu, was minister of agriculture. Later laws extended similar or greater benefits to other regions and in 1906 to the entire south. In practice, the legislation had little impact, because World War I interrupted any progress. However, it was the first time that funds derived from taxes paid by the prosperous north were used by central government agencies to stimulate economic activity in the south—or at least to win votes for government supporters.

Continuing southern poverty stimulated mass emigration from Sicily and the southern mainland, which averaged more than 500,000 people per year from about 1901 onward and rose to 900,000 in 1913, mainly to North and South America. About half of the migrants to the New World returned later, bringing new values as well as new money. Others sent back regular payments that contributed to the local economy. Some southerners crossed the Atlantic twice a year, commuting to seasonal agricultural work in Argentina. In the north most emigration to other European countries was seasonal, but many rural dwellers migrated within Italy to jobs in the expanding industrial cities. Migrants were usually young, male, unskilled, and illiterate, but many were also politically aware and militant, as the strong anarchist presence of Italians in the United States testified. Health and education

The other major social changes in these years, apart from emigration, resulted from the decline in serious illnesses and in illiteracy. Improved water supplies and sewerage meant fewer cholera epidemics—though these still occurred at times, as at Barletta in 1910–12. Malaria, a major scourge of the rural south, declined sharply as quinine became widely available after 1900. Pellagra, a vitamin-deficiency disease endemic among the northern peasantry, rapidly declined as diets improved. By 1901, for the first time, a majority (51.3 percent) of Italians could read and write. Emigrants needed to be able to write home, and so they had an incentive to learn. In 1911 the primary schools were removed from municipal control—poor communes had not been able to build schools or to enforce attendance—and were henceforth run and financed by the central government. Whereas most Italians at the time of national unification had spoken only their regional dialect, millions of people now spoke standard Italian, which they learned in school or in the army or for use as a lingua franca in the cities. A common language, common education, and common experience of military service had begun, by 1914, to “make Italians”—but religion, social class, and local loyalties still sharply divided them. World War I and fascism War and its aftermath Conduct of the war

On Giolitti’s resignation in March 1914, the more conservative Antonio Salandra formed a new government. In June, “Red Week,” a period of widespread rioting throughout the Romagna and the Marche, came in response to the killing of three antimilitarist demonstrators at Ancona. When World War I broke out in August, the Salandra government stayed neutral and began to negotiate with both sides—a policy that Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino described as “sacred egoism.” The Austrians eventually agreed to grant Trentino to Italy in exchange for an alliance, but the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia) made a more generous offer, promising Italy not only Trentino but also South Tirol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and northern Dalmatia. The Italians accepted this offer in the secret Treaty of London (April 1915) and joined the war against Austria-Hungary a month later, hoping for major territorial gains.

The negotiations, conducted by the foreign and prime ministers and a handful of diplomats, had been kept secret. The majority of deputies, meanwhile, favoured neutrality, as did former prime minister Giolitti, the major opposition groups (Catholics and Socialists), and most of the population. War therefore was supported only by the conservatives in government, by the Nationalist Association, a group formed in 1910 by Enrico Corradini and others to support Italian expansionism, by some Liberals who saw it as the culmination of the Risorgimento’s fight for national unity, by Republicans and reformist Socialists who knew nothing of the Treaty of London and thought they were fighting for national liberation, and by some syndicalists and extremist Socialists—including Benito Mussolini, then editor of the Socialist Party newspaper—who thought the war would bring about the overthrow of capitalism. Mussolini was soon expelled from the Socialist Party, but with help from the Triple Entente he managed to found his own alternative, pro-war newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”). Futurists and nationalists (including Gabriele D’Annunzio) agitated for intervention. In April–May 1915 the government, helped by a series of noisy demonstrations by pro-war activists (the so-called “Radiant Days of May”), pushed through its war policy despite the opposition of the majority in parliament and in the country. Neither Giolitti nor any other “neutralist” could form a government without renouncing the Treaty of London, betraying Italy’s new allies, and compromising the king. The Salandra government officially declared war against Austria-Hungary on May 23 and entered combat the following day. Meanwhile, despite a series of defections to the nationalist cause, the Socialist Party expressed its official position in the slogan “Neither adherence, nor sabotage.” Unlike its sister parties in the Second International (an international meeting of trade unions and socialist parties), the PSI did not get behind the Italian war effort. The reformist Claudio Treves voiced the pacifist opinions of the movement in parliament in 1917, when he made a plea that the troops should not spend another winter in the trenches. Other Socialists took a more active role against the war and distributed antiwar propaganda or organized desertions. Many Catholics also failed to support Italy’s participation in the war, although others took an active part in the conflict. In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV called for an end to what he called a “useless slaughter.”

In June 1916, after a series of military failures, the Salandra government resigned. The new prime minister was Paolo Boselli, who in turn resigned after the momentous military disaster at Caporetto in October 1917, which enabled the Austrians to occupy much of the Veneto in 1917 and 1918. This single battle left 11,000 Italian soldiers dead, 29,000 injured, and 280,000 taken prisoner. Some 350,000 Italian soldiers deserted or went missing, and 400,000 people became refugees. Only a strong rearguard action in November and December prevented further Austrian advances.

Caporetto signified the end of the war for many Italians and encapsulated the disastrous leadership of General Luigi Cadorna, as well as the terrible conditions under which the war was being fought. In some mountain regions, far more soldiers died from cold and starvation than from actual fighting with the Austrians. The generals themselves tended to blame the defeat at Caporetto on poor morale and “defeatism.” Cadorna blamed “shirkers” and called Caporetto a “military strike.” (Caporetto had coincided with the Russian Revolution of 1917). Cadorna himself was replaced by General Armando Diaz in November. Nonetheless, the invasion of Italian territory helped consolidate the war effort on the home front, and thousands of support committees, often sustained by middle-class groups, were formed to “defend the nation.” Some Socialist deputies and intellectuals, such as Turati, rallied to the war effort as the threat to Italian territory became clearer. After the war, the wounds of the defeat in 1917 were reopened in the long Caporetto Inquest of 1918–19, which blamed the invasion largely on various top military leaders.

The war was deeply unpopular both among the troops—mostly conscripted peasants who were undernourished and fighting for a cause few could understand—and among the civilian population back home, which included almost one million workers in arms factories who were also subject to military discipline. Many rebelled within the army. (It has been estimated that some 470,000 conscripts resisted call-up, 310,000 committed acts of indiscipline under arms, and 300,000 deserted.) More than one million soldiers came before military tribunals before a postwar amnesty was granted. Many once again saw the Italian state only as a repressive institution. Antiwar disturbances struck Milan in May 1917, and serious bread riots took place among the industrial workers of Turin in August 1917. Troops occupied Turin and took four days to restore order; some 50 demonstrators and 10 soldiers were killed in the clashes.

After November 1917 a more liberal government under Vittorio Emanuele Orlando rallied the country to defend its frontiers. Diaz made welfare concessions to the troops and fought a far more defensive campaign until October 1918, when, in the closing stages of the war, the Italians won a final, decisive victory at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. In reality, Italy’s victory was as much the result of the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany as of any radical transformation in the capacities and motivations of the Italian army. The cost of victory

Italy won the war, therefore, but at a huge cost: some 600,000 dead, 950,000 wounded, and a legacy of bitterness and division. The victorious patriots and nationalists now detested parliament, where the Giolittian majority had never supported the war, although they defended the idea of the nation and the war record of the Italian army. Many workers, peasants, Socialists, and trade unionists were disgusted by the costs of the conflict and were inspired by the revolutions in Russia and Germany. Returning veterans expected the land that they had been promised in 1917–18. The Italian flag became a powerful focus of division and hatred. War memorials were contested all over the peninsula. These divisions greatly weakened the postwar political regime and fractured elements of society.

Furthermore, the pro-war groups were themselves bitterly divided when the war ended. Should Italy, at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), try to secure the terms of the Treaty of London, as Foreign Minister Sonnino urged, or should it support U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and adhere to the “principle of nationality”—that is, be willing to accept less territory in the Adriatic region, as the Left Liberals and Republicans advocated? In the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), Italy gained Trentino, part of Slovene-speaking Gorizia, Trieste, the German-speaking South Tirol, and partly Croatian-speaking Istria. But Dalmatia was excluded, despite the Treaty of London, as was Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), a Yugoslav port largely inhabited by Italian speakers, which Sonnino had also decided to claim; so too were any colonial territories in Africa or Asia and any claim on Albania. Nationalists therefore argued that Italy had been robbed of its rightful gains (“a mutilated victory”).

Orlando resigned in June 1919. When the new government of the Radical leader Francesco Saverio Nitti was also unsuccessful in foreign affairs, the flamboyant poet Gabriele D’Annunzio led a group of volunteers to Fiume in September and captured the city himself. Fiume became a centre of nationalist agitation for more than a year, and D’Annunzio was dislodged (by Italian forces) only in December 1920 when Fiume became, briefly, an independent republic. Fiume became a symbol of heroic nationalism for those Italians who had supported the war and felt betrayed by the postwar settlement. Economic and political crisis: the “two red years”

Italy faced serious postwar economic problems. Wartime governments had printed money to pay for arms, and inflation intensified. By the end of 1920 the lira was worth only one-sixth of its 1913 value. Savings became nearly worthless, and rents collected by landowners plummeted in value. Meanwhile, the major arms and shipbuilding firms went bankrupt after the war for lack of government orders. Unemployment rose to two million as returning soldiers searched for work. Peasants, organized by trade unions, ex-servicemen’s groups, or Catholic leagues, seized land for themselves, especially in the south; agricultural labourers went on strike at harvest time. Trade unions, now operating again, pressed for higher wages, and strikes, including those in the public services, became routine. A series of stoppages paralyzed the railroads, as well as postal and telegraph services.

Throughout the biennio rosso (“two red years”; 1919–20), revolution appeared imminent. While spontaneous land occupations swept through the south, riots and lootings hit shopkeepers in the north and centre in the summer of 1919, and prices were cut by half throughout the country. Socialist deputies walked out of parliament in December 1919 to protest the presence of the king. They were attacked by nationalists, and widespread general strikes followed. In April 1920 the Piedmontese General Strike blocked work throughout Piedmont. The Socialist Party and the trade unions met in Milan to decide, absurdly, whether or not to call a revolution. They voted against, and Piedmont was isolated. In June 1920, mutinies, riots, and strikes hit the Ancona region and threatened to become an insurrection. Massive rural-worker agitation swept the whole of the Po valley and threatened the harvest during the summer of 1920. The Catholic “white” (as opposed to the Socialist “red”) union federation, the CIL (Confederazione Italiana Lavoratori), formed in 1918, grew massively throughout the biennio rosso, above all in the agricultural regions of the north and especially around Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona. A Catholic left even emerged in the north that preached revolution and led long strikes in Lombardy and the Veneto. Yet this mass movement never linked up with the Socialists, whose ideological anticlericalism alienated them from all wings of the Catholic movement.

The biennio rosso concluded with sit-down strikes in which workers occupied most of the factories of the north in August and September 1920. For three weeks workers attempted to continue production, seeking to promote the idea that they could “replace the ruling class” in thousands of factories across Italy. Meanwhile, the government (led again by the wily Giolitti) and the industrialists waited for the occupations to fizzle out, which they eventually did. The factory occupations marked not the beginning but the end of the mass movements of the biennio rosso.

The Socialist Party was dominated by its maximalist wing, a faction led by Giacinto Serrati that abandoned the Socialists’ prewar and wartime reformist policy for a more radical approach, and by the New Order (Ordine Nuovo) group of intellectuals based in Turin around Antonio Gramsci. These Socialists continually proclaimed the need for revolution and their desire to “do as in Russia.” Reformist leaders, such as Turati, were isolated and vilified. However, the party did little to actually prepare for revolution, and its working-class base, as well as most trade union leaders, remained largely moderate and reformist. Only in Turin, where the factory council movement undermined both union and employer power, did revolutionary practice go beyond the empty rhetoric of the maximalists. As Serrati put it, the maximalists based their strategy on the view that “We Marxists interpret history, we do not make it.” Very little attempt was made to link up the two great classes of Italian society, the workers and the peasants, and the middle classes were either ignored or reviled as “doomed to disappear.” “Who does not work shall not eat” was one popular maximalist anti-middle-class slogan. Socialists and unions were extremely hostile to small property and favoured land collectivization, a policy that alienated the new class of small landowners created before and after the war across Italy. Catholic and Socialist unions also fought each other bitterly throughout this period and failed to form alliances to fight the Fascist onslaught against both movements after 1920. Each movement was hamstrung by its deep-rooted, ideological distrust of the other—the Socialists by their anticlericalism, the Catholics by their antisocialism.

The postwar coalition governments of Nitti (1919–20) and his successors Giolitti (1920–21), Ivanoe Bonomi (1921–22), and Luigi Facta (February–October 1922) were all weak and could do little except repress the strike movements by force or urge industrialists and landowners to make concessions not only on pay but even on “control” of the workplace. Inflation threatened the livelihood of many of those on fixed incomes, especially pensioners, administrative workers, and other groups not able to organize as effectively as industrial workers. These governments were powerless to keep prices from rising or to satisfy the demands of the unions. Nor was there any attempt at serious reform of the state or the economy—a project that Turati outlined in his Rifare l’Italia! (1920; “Remake Italy!”). The possibility of a democratic revolution was lost in the violence, bitterness, and fear of the postwar years.

Diplomatic and economic failures undermined middle-class confidence in government, especially when Giolitti also imposed taxes on war profits. In 1919 universal male suffrage and proportional representation were introduced for parliamentary elections. The result, in the new parliament elected in November 1919, was that the Socialists, with 30 percent of the vote, became the largest party, with 156 seats, and the new (Catholic) Italian Popular Party, with more than 20 percent of the vote, won 100 seats. These two parties dominated northern and central Italy. Giolitti had to bring the Popular Party into his government in 1920 and make many concessions to certain peasant interests, including giving guarantees to squatters and giving the Ministry of Agriculture to the Catholics. These reforms did not go far enough to satisfy the landless peasants but managed to terrify landowners. Furthermore, the two “subversive” parties won control of almost half the municipalities in the autumn of 1920, ensuring that Socialist or Catholic cooperatives would be given all local public works contracts. The radical language of the maximalist local campaigns particularly alarmed the urban middle classes.

In January 1921, during a congress in Livorno, the left wing of the Socialists split away to found the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista d’Italia, later Partito Communista Italiano [PCI]; now Democrats of the Left [Democratici di Sinistra]), which increased middle-class alarm. In reality, this split was a sign of defeat and weakened the left. The Communist Party—led by Amadeo Bordiga (until 1924), who advocated abstention from elections, and then by Palmiro Togliatti—pursued a sectarian policy of eschewing anti-Fascist alliances, which made the victory of the right far easier than it might have been. The PCI began to depend heavily on support and orders from Moscow, a close relationship that was to last well into the 1970s. The Fascist era The rise of Mussolini

The political crisis of the postwar years provided an opportunity for militant, patriotic movements, including those of ex-servicemen and former assault troops, students, ex-syndicalists, and former pro-war agitators. D’Annunzio in Fiume led one such movement, but the ex-Socialist journalist Benito Mussolini soon became even more prominent, founding his fasci di combattimento (“fighting leagues”), better known as Fascists, in Milan in March 1919. The group’s first program was a mishmash of radical nationalist ideas, with strong doses of anticlericalism and republicanism. Proposals included the confiscation of war profits, the eight-hour day, and the vote for women.

Benito Mussolini.H. Roger-Viollet

Mussolini’s movement was initially unsuccessful, but Fascists soon began to agitate in the streets and against the left. In April 1919 Fascists and nationalists burned down the offices of the national Socialist daily, L’Avanti!, in Milan. Four people were killed, and the paper shut down for several days. This was the first demonstration of the ability of the Fascists to attack Socialist institutions. The offices of L’Avanti! were attacked twice more between 1920 and 1922. Organized militias began to attract support across Italy in an anti-Bolshevik crusade that united various social and political sectors and organizations. Local Fascist groups were soon founded in Emilia, Tuscany, and Puglia and by autumn 1920 were busy not only breaking up strikes but also dismantling Socialist and Catholic labour unions and peasants’ cooperatives and—often with police collusion—overthrowing newly elected local councils. Fascist squads, dressed in black-shirted uniforms and often financed by landowners or industrialists, used systematic violence to destroy these organizations. Thousands of people were beaten, killed, or forced to drink castor oil and run out of town. Hundreds of union offices, employment centres, and party newspapers were looted or burnt down. In October 1920, after the election of a left administration in Bologna, Fascists invaded the council chamber, causing mayhem and nine deaths. The council was suspended by the government. Later, Socialist and Catholic deputies were run out of parliament or had their houses destroyed. The biennio nero (“two black years”; 1921–22) destroyed opposition to the Fascists. Union organizations were crushed. The Federterra shrank from some one million members to fewer than 6,000 in less than five years. Unable to defend basic democratic rights or to prevent the criminal activities of a private militia that operated openly and nationwide, the state had lost all credibility.