The Crisis of the

Early Italian Renaissance

Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty
in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny

By HANS BARON
RESEARCH FELLOW AND BIBLIOGRAPHER
THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY, CHICAGO

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

1955
 Copyright, 1955, by Princeton University Press
London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press
L. C. Card No. 54-6073

Printed in the United States of America

by Princeton University Press at Princeton, New Jersey
 To

Walter Goetz
my teacher and friend

who introduced me to the Renaissance

and taught me that history
should be a study of both politics and culture

On his 87 th birthday,
November I I, 1954,
in gratitude
 PREFACE

T
HE method of interpreting great turning-points in the
history of thought against their social or political
background has not yet rendered its full service in
the study of the Italian Renaissance. To be sure, the long
accepted vievv that the emergence of Renaissance culture stood
in close relationship to the rise of a new civic, or bourgeois,
society has proved fruitful in many fields of Renaissance re-
search; and equally useful has been the knowledge that the
late Renaissance was molded by a new courtly society, first in
the Italy of the signories and principates, and later in the great
European monarchies of the sixteenth century. But neither
viewpoint helps to explain the fact that one of the greatest
forward-strides occurred about the year 1400. By then, the
civic society of the Italian city-states had been in existence for
many generations and was perhaps already past its prime; and
the hour when the Italian courts would transform Renaissance
culture to their likeness still lay in the future. The places
which held cultural predominance in the first decades of the
Quattrocento were not as yet the seats of the tyrants, later
to become famous, but rather the remaining city-state repub-
lics led by Florence. Yet at that very moment, with compara-
tive suddenness, a change in Humanism as well as in the arts
took place which ever since has been considered to have given
birth to the ripe pattern of the Renaissance. The medieval
elements which had survived through the Trecento were then
either destroyed or transformed. Antiquity became the model,
and the measure of life, in a first era of classicism.
May we assume that so deep a transformation of all ideas
of man and life came about without the stimuli of a fresh and
pregnant experience in the politico-social sphere? Or that the
classicist acceptance of standards antagonistic to native tradi-
tions should then not have produced the signs of crisis in cul-
VIn PREFACE

ture and society that are so well known from later phases of
the Renaissance, inside and outside of Italy?
In studying the background of the early Renaissance we
encounter one remarkable fact: The generation which was
young about the year 1400 witnessed in its lifetime events de-
cisive for the survival of civic freedom and a system of in-
dependent states on the Peninsula. Although the time had
passed when large parts of Italy were crowded with free
cities, and although tyranny was marching toward the period
\vhen monarchical absolutism would reign supreme, yet, at
the turn from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, some
of the surviving city-states and local powers, \vith the Floren-
tine Republic their leader, were \vaging a protracted fight
\vhich succeeded in setting limits to the triumphant progress
of tyranny in Renaissance Italy. The upshot of that contest
was the failure of monarchical absolutism to build up one
centralized north and central Italian state comparable to the
political and cultural structure of sixteenth-century France
and Spain; and the republican freedom of the city-state re-
mained a vital strand in the Italian Renaissance.
Was, then, awareness of the historic significance of this
struggle a ferment in the thought and culture of the Renais-
sance at the time when Humanism and the arts, in their first
great flowering, had their focus in Florence? The present
book is meant to give an answer to this crucial question.
It is not our intention to claim that this experience was the
only one among the political, or social, or economic factors
which may have acted upon the period of transition around
1400; or that the findings set forth on the following pages
establish in themselves a fresh estimate of the balance between
tyranny and civic freedom in the Italian Renaissance. Our
study seeks merely to prove that, as soon as we no longer take
for granted the crude cliche that by the end of the fourteenth
century the time for civic liberty ,vas over and tyranny was
the only possible road into the future, we quickly become
 .
PREFACE IX

aware of a forgotten world of actions and ideas in a group of

citizens and civic humanists who were not ready to accept the
apparent decision of fate. When their lives and their ideas
are reconstructed, the whole period around 1400 begins to
shift its accents. Sources published but neglected, and sources
still unpublished, both reveal a wealth of fresh data; an un-
expected pattern emerges. Memoirs and the minutes of city
councils tell of civic conduct and convictions such as are com-
monly thought to have disappeared with the medieval com-
mune. Many historiographical works of the period, far from
being informed by the spirit of rising tyranny, show the seeds
of an approach to history which was to flourish in the Floren-
tine Republic of the late Renaissance. When it is seen further
that in the creation of the new politico-historical ideas the
Florentine humanists cooperated with non-humanist civic
writers, we also become alive to facts suggesting that there
existed between Humanism and the native Volgare element
a relation very different from the time-honored identification
of the Volgare tradition with the medieval commune, and of
Humanism with the tyranny of the Renaissance. So close and
friendly, indeed, became the interpenetration between Flor-
entine Humanism and the civic element in some circles that
early Quattrocento Florence saw the first phase of the querelle
between classicism of the pure breed and civic loyalty to native
traditions. After this transfornlation of the general picture of
the period, even the well known portraits of the leading hu-
manists of early Renaissance Florence begin to change; we
learn to distinguish between mere literary men-the repre-
sentatives of the new classicism-and humanists nurtured on
the political and social experiences of their day. The civic
Humanism of the latter reveals its close affinity-a kinship
not yet clearly seen in earlier approaches to the period-to
the outlook and sentiment of the citizens of the Greek polis.
Finally, having thus redrawn a formerly dim spot on the map
of the early Renaissance, we also see more distinctly the con-
x PREFACE

tours of the well known portions: even the political literature

produced at tyrant courts and the group of sources echoing
the militant classicism of the period, appear more sharply de-
fined in their characteristic manner; and their deep-rooted
antagonism to the contemporary civic forces is clearly seen in
more than one neglected source of information.
It should be said once more that an estimate of the bearing
of these discoveries on our total view of the Italian Renais-
sance is not the purpose of the following pages-although the
author hopes that his readers will pose this wider problem to
themselves. But in one way or another, the fact that the ac-
tions, insights, and guiding values here described existed and
had a vital meaning at the moment when the pattern of the
Renaissance emerged, must henceforth cause us to look upon
all phases of the Renaissance from a new vantage-point.

The first thing needed in this situation, the author believes,

is a kind of cicerone-a guide through hitherto overlooked
riches which should be available in future discussions on the
nature of the Renaissance. Although a constant effort has been
made to give to the account the literary qualities required of
a work which must be addressed to the general historian in-
terested in the Renaissance, still, under the circumstances, the
writer finds it necessary to prepare the ground cautiously as
the book proceeds, alternating narrative with analysis and
critical argument, and choosing for his subject not a systematic
construction of the major themes of Quattrocento thought,
but rather their reflections in individual contemporary writ-
ings. These are examined one by one, and generously quoted
in proportion to their value as witnesses to the spirit of Early-
Renaissance Humanism. The author, indeed, has felt he
should deal with his material somewhat as a custodian per-
forms his labors for a valuable collection, dating every single
piece, establishing its genuineness and origin, and making it
visible from every angle.
 PREFACE
.
Xl

Technically, it has seemed possible to present this in-

dispensable preparatory labor and yet not destroy the reada-
bility of the book, by giving in the first volume an historical
account that is intended to be self-contained and intelligible
without the extensive appendices and notes of the second
volume, and by placing much of the burden of the foundation
work on a forthcoming and separate book which undertakes a
systematic review of most of the sources of information on
which is built the present reconstruction of the crisis at the be-
ginning of the Quattrocento. * Those critical discussions repre-
sent a kind of prolegomena to the historical synthesis given in
the first volume of the present book, and although the syn-
thesis has absorbed the results of the preparatory study and
does not presuppose a knowledge of it, the reader should be
aware that at many points we are working with fresh build-
ing-stones, and that examination of their quality demands in-
spections of the quarry from which they have been taken. In
relevant places, therefore, cross-references will be found be-
tween the two books. Since, in addition, all quotations inserted
in the text have been rendered into English, and quotations
contained in the notes are as a rule followed by translations,
it should be easy for an interested reader, wherever he feels
the need, to follow the progress of the reconstruction from the
raw material to the finished presentation.
The organization of the present work requires still an-
other explanation. Although the fresh element in our ap-
proach is the attention paid to the response of early Renais-
sance thought to the challenge of a political crisis, most of
the documents with which we are to work are humanistic
writings which have usually been investigated only by stu-
dents of Italian or neo-Latin literature. As soon as we begin
* Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Be-
ginning of the Quattrocento: Studies in Criticism and Chronology (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1955). Henceforth cited as Humanistic and Political Litera-
ture.