Varieties of Revolt (ii): Leaders, Hate, Nobles, Ritual, Children, the Popolo

Abstract

First, as in late medieval Italy, popular revolt, 1494 to 1559, did not depend on leaders from outside their ranks—the clergy, mayors, or the nobility—as social scientists have asserted for ‘pre-modern’ revolts generally and may have become increasingly the case in seventeenth-century France. However, enigmatically, chroniclers and commentators named these Italian leaders from the rank-and-file of commoners less often than they had during the Middle Ages. Second, given the military occupation, the abuses of foreign troops towards residential populations, and the destructive billeting of troops, waves of foreign hatred rarely passed from resistance against foreign troops to massacres of foreign civilians and never approached the trans-territorial slaughter of the French during the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. On the other hand, popular strife among nonelites against their local nobilities was more frequent than in the Middle Ages. Yet these revolts did not manifest blind fury or a ‘negative class consciousness’ as R.H. Hilton has argued for late medieval Europe. Third, children and adolescents continued to appear in popular revolt but never comprised a prominent feature of these revolts. As seen with late medieval Italy, their appearance as rebels was not ‘something of a biological truism’ as some historians have alleged for early modern Europe. Finally, by 1494 the centre of gravity of popular revolt had shifted from what it had been in the late fourteenth century, away from the disenfranchised popolo minuto towards skilled, guild-based artisans, shopkeepers, and petty merchants but which also could include poorer even starving populations.