Petrarch's War: Florentine Wages and the Black Death

Abstract

The nature of the Florentine economy during the era of plague and the so-called crisi del trecento has been the subject of a great deal of study and debate. The nuanced and sophisticated discourse has proceeded, however, without proper consideration of warfare, which coincided with the other crises, but has been relegated in the Anglophone scholarship to the lonely subfield of military history. Recent studies have helped improve the status quo and blur rigid disciplinary lines. But there remains a stubborn tendency among scholars to separate Italian war from its societal milieu, to follow the lead of Machiavelli in treating armed conflict in moral terms, focusing on the use by states of mercenary soldiers, who were emblematic of a lack of native martial spirit and of bad warfare. The tendency is particularly marked for the middle years of the trecento, the era of the “companies of adventure,” when states relied on foreign soldiers from outside the peninsula arrayed in large bands. This was, as a recent sc...