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7. Contexts
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r s e v e n Contexts Government and the Economy: Economic Policy, Fiscal Policy, Business Interests and Government. The Region and the City: Urban Geography, Industrial Resources, Agriculture, Economic Integration. Private Wealth: Social Mobility, A Profile of Wealth Distribution in 1427, Redistribution of Wealth in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Government and the Economy Economic Policy In surveying the economy of Florence we have often encountered many ways in which the government impinged on economic activity, and now it is time to take up this theme alone and to evaluate the role of the government in the economy. Hence the following discussion includes much material scattered throughout the preceding chapters that is relevant to government economic policies and initiatives , but it is brought together here to be seen in the light of the context government provided for economic activity. In the course of its evolution from the thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century—the period of the republic—the government underwent a profound transformation. The locus of power evolved from a loose corporate structure of institutions to a reasonably coherent elite, yet old institutions survived, holding on to their identity while undergoing redefinition in function and even relegation to the periphery of power. The overriding trend emerges clearly notwithstanding the obfuscatory survival of a plethora of obsolescent institutions and a government still run less by a central bureaucracy than by innumerable citizen committees and overlapping legislative councils, with all the attendant features of broad participation in the political process and complex electoral procedures . It is the mark of the genius of three generations of Medici in the fifteenth century—Cosimo il Vecchio (1389–1464), his son Piero (1418–69), and his grand- Contexts 485 son Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–92)—that from behind the scenes, without holding any formal political position, they were able to assert their leadership of the elite by manipulating the state’s ramshackle constitution while leaving it intact . However, Cosimo’s descendant and namesake, Duke, later Grand Duke, Cosimo I (1519–74), clarified the matter by cleaning out the political stables—in the manner of Hercules, his personification in art—and laying the foundations of a truly absolutist state. Most of the republican institutions were thrown out, and those that survived, including two of the most important economic institutions , were redefined in altogether new terms: the Mercanzia, now pushed out of the political sphere and confined to a strictly judicial function; and the guilds, most of which were merged into even larger agglomerates, with their headquarters relocated under one roof, the Uffizi, where they were absorbed into the new ducal bureaucracy. In the early fourteenth century both the guilds and the Mercanzia, along with the official organs of the commune, were the agencies that made decisions and took actions of an economic nature. Economic policy was therefore a composite of the ideas and objectives that drove these bodies, each of which had its own interests. The origin of the guilds is lost in the obscurity of the early history of the city. By the time we have some precise notion of them, they were already undergoing that process of agglomeration that made Florence a distinctive guild republic. Florentine guilds did what guilds did everywhere: they controlled their matriculation rosters and therefore entrance into the crafts and trades within their separate spheres; they adjudicated disputes among their members; they regulated the practice of their respective activities, especially with regard to quality; they provided certain social and welfare services to their members. The very process of agglomeration, however, meant that the more complex ones lost something of the distinctive identity associated with separate crafts and trades. Moreover, during the fourteenth century guilds became ever more subordinated to the centralizing authority of an increasingly assertive government. Much of the internal politics of the city revolved around the struggle between the minor and major guilds for representation in the councils of government, resulting in periods of widening or narrowing of the popular basis of the government. The most democratic regime came with the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, when low-skilled wool workers (the ciompi), dyers, and doublet makers succeeded momentarily in gaining guild status and representation in the government. But the oligarchic reaction that followed in 1382 brought a return to the original guild structure. From then on, political power rested in the hands of an elite that assured the...