A History of Florence 1200–1575 (review)

Is there any genre so perilous and unforgiving as the survey text? They are as much the products of their time as of the pen of any particular author. Only a deep bed of recent research can justify a new survey, and so the trends of the field inevitably influence its shape and content. But without a strong personal vision, the author can easily be more captive than master of these sources, and will produce a flat narrative. A History of Florence is not just a brilliant synthesis: it is a definitive and compelling interpretation of how Florence became the city whose history, culture, and thought continue to fascinate scholars and tourists alike. By keeping the paradoxes of that history and culture in the foreground, Najemy conveys what is extraordinary in the Florentine achievement without ever falling victim to the romanticism that frequently makes myth of the history and that has turned the city itself into Renaissanceland.

Two elements are critical here. The narrative arc is long enough to incorporate both the medieval factionalism and the early modern absolutism that are the cause and consequence of Florence's Renaissance history. And Najemy offers as a consistent theme through this almost four-century span the defining importance for the city's politics, economy, and cultural life of constantly shifting relations between the magnates, the popolo, and the artisans and workers. Najemy casts their triangulation — with fluid boundaries, mutating self-definitions and self-deceptions, inner factions, opportunistic alliances, deep fears, and constant ambitions — as the foundation and background of his narrative.

This triangulation frames the key stages and ongoing paradox between civic myths of republican liberty and the recurring reflex turns to authoritarianism when liberty actually threatened. The Duchy of Tuscany is not the denial of Florence's republican history, but its logical, and even inevitable, outcome. We see the first moves soon after the emergence of the popolo commune and its hijacking by magnates who come to realize how readily republican institutions can be manipulated to provide them with greater security and wealth. The pattern recurs with the popolo's realization after the Ciompi reform that their lot is better cast with magnates than with artisans, and again with the magnates' realization that their lot is better cast with the Medici even as the screws tighten. Occasional eruptions like the Ciompi or the repeated expulsions of the Medici halt the drift temporarily, but generate enough upheaval and uncertainty that they stimulate either a pacification or a strategic realignment of factions that reverses the change and resumes the progress towards absolutism.

Najemy deftly balances chronology and structure as he weaves key economic, social, and cultural developments into this analysis. Early chapters on "The Elite" and "The Popolo" introduce the major players; later ones on "Domestic Economy and Merchant Empires" and "War, Territorial Expansion, and the Transformation of Political Discourse" clarify how Florence expands its reach through the peninsula and Europe, and a few vivid synchronic chapters on "Family and State" and on "Luxury Economy and Art Patronage" set Florence's cultural and social history into this broader narrative. Separate chapters explore the political machinations of Cosimo, Lorenzo, the papacy, and the duchy in telling detail. Throughout there are passages where Najemy distills the findings of single monographs or whole subfields into brief surveys — like the design and operation of the Catasto, or the dynamics of the Savonarolan movement — that are models of clarity and economy. And while social forces dominate, Najemy still recognizes the role of individual skill and ability, as for example among those Trecento Medici who seized the opportunities in a divided papacy to establish profitable banking connections that vaulted them to power, or their Cinquecento descendents, like Pope Clement VII and Duke Cosimo I, who induced the ottimati to do their dirty work while deliberately stripping them of the very powers they were desperate to preserve.

Najemy's commitment to foregrounding the details and actors in political dynamics means that the intricate maneuvers by...