A Struggle for Liberty in the Renaissance: Florence, Venice, and Milan in the Early Quattrocento

Abstract

THE period when the Florentine Commonwealth defended civic liberty against Giangaleazzo Visconti was but a fleeting episode in the development of the Italian Renaissance. The cataclysmic events which, within four or five years, had wiped out every independent state between Rome and Milan with the exception of Florence, and in 1402 for a while had left the Florentine Republic the only opponent to universal monarchy in Italy, did not repeat themselves. But the calmer days that had preceded the storm of Giangaleazzo's expansion-the days when each region of Italy was relatively free to attend to its own affairs-were also gone. Events at the turn of the century had wrought an irrevocable transformation in the interstate relations of the peninsula. The time had passed when small states could defend their independence in isolation. Soon Giangaleazzo's place was taken by other powerful princes: first by the ruler of the south Italian kingdom, and then by Giangaleazzo's son and successor. A generation tired by twelve years of ceaseless diplomatic conflict and open war (I390-I402) was gradually forced to recognize that what had happened in Giangaleazzo's last years had been only the first of a series of events that were to repeat themselves more than once during the early Quattrocento. Again and again Florence found herself called upon to defend the fruits of her past struggle. Now trying to stir up all dormant elements of resistance in Italy, now acting within coalitions, she was for decades to remain the barrier against successive threats of new monarchical expansion. How did it happen that the ambitious program of the Visconti, the outgrowth of a century of north Italian development, was, soon after Giangaleazzo's death, for a while taken over by the king of Naples? Giangaleazzo had dealt a deathblow to medieval localism in three great