Prologue

Abstract

The prologue investigates popular protest from the end of the late medieval zenith of revolt c. 1425, to when this book’s focus begins with Charles VIII’s crossing the Alps into Italy in 1494, igniting the Italian wars and foreign military occupation that endured for the next sixty-five years. I have gathered these protests from two samples, first from reviewing the secondary literature of popular revolt in fifteenth-century Florence and then by surveying contemporary edited chronicles from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in the region of the Marche, where historians have yet to explore popular insurrection. Despite the preponderance of chronicles on the fifteenth century, overwhelmingly these revolts in the Marche concentrate in the fourteenth century and then re-emerge with the sixteenth century. Moreover, those from the fourteenth century reveal sophisticated organization of the popolo in small cities such as Fermo and Jesi, which overthrew rule by the papacy, condottieri, and larger city-states to extend constitutionally political representation across classes. The chapter ends by speculating on the reasons for the decline in popular revolt in fifteenth-century Italy.