Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

Abstract

This is the first book to analysis popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. From over one hundred contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, it has placed these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. It finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts as with shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past as with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this book demonstrates that democracies do not just die under duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.