Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348-1434 (review)

In this dense book, Samuel Cohn offers a bold new interpretation of the transition from the late medieval to the Renaissance state in Florence. Turning away from often celebratory studies of political tracts, diplomacy, wars, and constitutional reforms that dominate Florentine historiography, Cohn instead embeds his analysis of state formation in political geography and social conflict. He considers the consolidation of power by the Florentine regional state from the perspective of peasants living on the mountainous periphery, which he deems a periphery of both geography and class. It was in the mountains that the architects of the Florentine regional state met their most strenuous opposition to expansion in the form of peasant revolts and widespread population movements.

Based on an eighty-seven year survey of tax records from the Black Death (1348) to the beginning of Medici ascendance (1434), Cohn argues that a series of successful peasant uprisings between 1401 and 1405 forced the Florentine government to change its attitudes and policies toward its rural subjects. In response to these rebellions, the Florentine ruling class began to consider its own welfare as more closely intertwined with that of its surrounding district. After 1402, Florentine tax policies shifted from oppressive, exploitative measures to more equitable, sensitive means of assisting rural communities which suffered demographic flight. In resisting heavy tax burdens, highlanders stimulated state development yet molded it to their own advantage. Peasant protests and petitions ultimately “convinced city elites to revolutionize the Florentine tax system from an old mosaic of unequal taxation based on the rural community to a ‘universal tax’ based on individual wealth.” (p.6) The crucial teachers of Florentine statecraft were not humanists or political philosophers but thousands of mountain peasants living on the frontiers.

In constructing this argument and chronology, Cohn reinforces various hallmarks of his prolific work: the reliance on statistical analysis of serial records as the primary evidence; the search for critical turning points within long-term structures of politics, mentalities, and demographic regimes; an interest in geographical place as a key determinant of historical experience; and the ability to think outside the box of conventional historical interpretation. These virtues notwithstanding, Cohn’s case is not completely convincing.

The book is divided into three parts. The first and most successful part considers the relationship between city and countryside, and compares the social world of highlanders with lowlanders. Cohn shows how the countryside was not a homogeneous area but was formed instead by a mosaic of communities, with differing economies, terrain, population size, and relationships to the center city. He establishes a three-tiered distinction between communities based on geographical location: the innermost ring of rural population living in the plains around Florence, which enjoyed privileged tax status because of connections to wealthy citizen investors; an intermediate zone of hillside villages; and distant mountain communes situated over 500 meters in elevation, which faded in and out of Florentine control throughout the fourteenth century. Cohn identifies striking differences in patterns of association between mountain dwellers and plainsmen, based on tax surveys, criminal proceedings, wills and other notarial records. Highlanders created a much wider array of networks for themselves than did lowlanders, crossing political and parochial borders in their migrations, marriages, and criminal collusion. Here Cohn effectively debunks the image of mountain peasants constructed by Braudel and others. Far from being a backward, semi-pagan lot, these highlanders were as numerate and Christian as lowland tenants and sharecroppers, and seemingly more sociable as well.

These mountain communities also bore the brunt of radically unequal tax assessments prior to the universal flat tax enacted in 1427. In the second and third chapters, Cohn shows how “taxes were the lever that turned the demographic and economic history of the countryside” during the late fourteenth century. (p.91) Burdened by crushing tax loads, mountain inhabitants fled from certain poverty not by migrating downward toward the more privileged plains, but rather by escaping upward over the border of Florentine...