(What began as) a brief History of Tuscany

I began writing this entry with the intent to provide a little background knowledge to help contextualize the region of Tuscany as I explore and discuss various pieces of it but as most historians will realize, nothing in History is ever brief. It is far too complex and interrelated to be able to truly sum in up in a short and concise manner so I will apologize in advance for the small chapter of history textbook I have written here for you and if you want to skip to the good stuff, here are the main points before I jump into it:

1. Tuscany used to belong to the Etruscans who were more of a group of tribes rather than a cohesive culture
2. Rome Invades, using Etruscan Rivalries to successfully conquer the Area
3. After Rome fell, a few of the barbaric Neighbours fought over the region for a while, specifically the Ostrogoths and the Lombards
4. Eventually the Carolingian Empire won control but because they were so distant, fought for influence over the region with the much closer Papacy
5. Tuscany is gifted to the Papacy with the death of a ruling family but the main cities are giving independent rulership
6. Florence begins thriving with its close ties to the Papcy as an independent City state
7. Tuscany experiences a great Rivalry between Florence and Siena which leads to the massive construction projects of the two cities, built competitively
8. Cosimo Medici gains power and finally conquers Siena into his own Duchy
9. Through various purchases and conquered lands, he shapes the borders of what is Tuscan today
10. The Mediterranean declines as a trade center and falls out of significance on the world stage

Tuscany, as we know it today, began in 1570 B.C. When Pope Pious V conferred the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany (which was really only Florence) onto Cosimo Medici (you should remember his name because it keeps being important). The earlier civilizations, naturally, did not fit so neatly into what we now know as Tuscany. Though there were Ligurians in northern Italy, the Etruscans were dominant farther south during the time, including all of present day Tuscany and Rome itself.

Etruscans built on hilltops in order to exploit the agricultural lands below from a defensible position. You can see how Tuscany with its rolling hills and rich soil would have appealed to them. The Etruscans were a culture that relied heavily on the lifestyle of the Greeks with aristocracy participating in banqueting, chariot races, and hunting as evidenced by illustrations left on tomb walls. Where they were heavily reliant culturally, however, they neglected to carry the Greek ideology into their government.

The Etruscan cities, for all their allusions to Greek culture lacked some of their democratic, city-state spirit. Never being able to form effective alliances amongst themselves because of the competition between rival aristocrats, Etruria was really more of a loosely unified confederacy of disparate cities represented by individual chieftains. This was a weakness it's neighbours couldn't help but exploit, with Celtic raids and Carthaginian sea assaults at the dawning of the 4th century left the area vulnerable to Roman expansion.  Rome’s takeover was calculating and tenacious, exploiting rivalries between classes and cities so some settlements were destroyed while others survived mostly undamaged by allying themselves with the incoming Romans.  Roman control was decisively secured by the planting of Roman military veterans into the colonies to instil and inspire absolute loyalty regardless of physical remoteness from the main body of the Roman Empire and by building colonies as neighbours to previous Etruscan strongholds: Fiorentia, “The place of Flowers”-now Florence- was a Roman colony established along the Via Cassia where it crossed the Arno River, just below the Etrurian Fiesole.

The second method for fortifying Etruria and a Roman stronghold was the installation of Roads. The economic bloom of trade quickly replaced the suffering of wartime as the land became more easily navigable and it’s resources more efficiently utilized within the beauracracy of the empire rather than the bickering of backwater chieftains trying to one-up one another and maintain independence. Although Tuscany suffered from a few civil wars in the 1^st century, it quickly quieted under the prosperity it found in conjunction with Rome.

The Romans had a few other tricks that aided them in their success dominating neighbouring populations. One of the largest ones was stability. Typically a Roman town would take 120-140 years to accumulate a full range of buildings; the forum, marketplace, temples, public halls, theatres, and bathes. This was possible in the late 1^st century BC and the early 3^rd century AD. These structures made the Town seem eternal and the Empire wealthy and limitless in its power and reach. Because they were mostly public structures, it employed local workers and were unavoidable to view and appreciate. Their usefulness made them the center of city commerce and quickly integrated a Roman Mind set. Their size and the quality of construction shaped the core of Italian cities forever. 

When the Western Roman Empire disintegrated in the 5^th century, the Ostrogoths became the rulers of Italy. Tuscany suffered like many parts of the peninsula through the attempts of the Byzantines, the surviving Eastern part of the Empire (remember the tetrarchy?) to regain control. Turmoil followed through much of the next two centuries as the Lombards came through and the remains of the Roman empire were fought over by the barbaric cultures which had existed along it’s borders for so long.  The Via Cassia also declined as the Lombards struck a new road- the via Francigena between Rome and Northern Europe but it was still used for Pilgrimage and since Europe was now largely Christian, Rome became a focus of Pilgrimage (Peter) so monasteries sprung up along the way to care for the pilgrims.

The ultimate defeat of the Lombards by the new invaders, the Franks, and the coronation of the Frankish King, Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800 opened a new era. Technically, the Tuscan area belong to Charlemagne and his successors but the Frankish empire was based on the far side of the Alps. Like the trouble with the Western Roman Empire at it’s fall, when borders are too far away to ostensibly control and dominate, power and jurisdiction begin to slip away.  Often, the force field of the Roman Papacy was more strongly felt. In the 11^th century, the Emperors granted Tuscia (Tuscany) to the Canossa Family to control remotely like a dukedom. The last of the Family line was a woman named Matilda who defied the Emperors by allying her territory to the Popes. On her deathbed, in 1115 she left the majority of her worldly possessions to the papacy but established Florence, Siena, and Lucca as free cities and set each of them to crafting their own communal government.

The city governments always looked back with admiration to the Roman republic and its civic virtues. Many cities had Roman ruins to prompt them.  The 14^th century saw Tuscany as a centre of civic humanism, a movement that was as much concerned with intellectual endeavour as with the creation of workable governments. Alongside this intellectual rebirth, went an intense interest in self-glorification in both public and in private spaces leading to intense competition between cities.

In the 15^th century, the mood, of Florence particularly, had changed. While the previous era had been the age of public commission, the 15^th century saw a shift towards private enterprise.  A mass of new palaces were commissioned and politics moved from council chambers to private studies and courtyards. No one could have foreseen the meteoric rise of one family, the Medici, who capably manipulated the environment of republican values so as to become the unofficial ruling family of Florence, much less that their descendants would reign as hereditary grand dukes of Tuscany for a full two hundred years.

The families wealth was founded by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. Giovanni used his assets, many of them accruing from his management of the Papal finances, cautiously, working quietly on committees and aligning himself with the smaller guilds in their campaigns to get richer and pay more tax. His honesty in honouring his financial obligations gained the family a reputation for integrity. Giovanni’s son, Cosimo (not the really important one I mentioned earlier) was more assertive in his use of money. His loans underpinned the financing of Florence’s war with Lucca to such an extent that he was accused of wishing to prolong it. He carefully built up clients behind the scenes, being particularly useful in passing on petitions to the papacy, whose finances the Medici still ran (at one point the popes has to pledge the small town of Sanspolcro as a loan, and it later became part of Florence’s territory.) By the end of his days, the Medici family could be compared, in terms of influence, to a first world government today. The amount of wealth, prestige, and control exuded by the family shaped Tuscany, Italy, and much of Southern Europe is today unmatched even by the Royal family. Cosimo died in 1464. His son, Piero il Gottoso (the gouty), succeeded him at a time when the family fortune was further bolstered by gaining the monopoly of the alum mines in papal territory (Alum is a mineral used to fix dye in cloth) thus everything was in place for a triumphant succession for Piero’s son, Lorenzo “The Magnificent” in 1469. Lorenzo’s reign was seen as the peak of the renaissance, the culminating moment of enlightened patronage, but unfortunate his arrogant assumption of control offended many of the city’s leading citizens 

A mass of documents and petitions from smaller cities of Tuscany-- Arezzo, Pistoia, Prato, and Pisa—show how closely the Medici were involved in their government. Lorenzo even forced the Pope to make his young son, Giovanni (the Future Pope Leo X), a cardinal.  The opulence of Lorenzo’s rule masked the fragility of its control in the city, and crucially, the family fortune, which was badly managed, and diminishing. By the times of his death, the Medici family was in crisis.

In 1494, Charles V11, a French King, invaded Italy leaving enormous instability in his wake leading to the foundation of a remarkably unstable republican government whose most notable member was Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) whose pragmatic reflections on government, notable in The Prince were rooted in the cynical power-brokering of the age.  This, perhaps inevitably, was the era when Tuscany became the plaything of outsiders, specifically in the form of the popes (though two of these, Leo X and Clement VII were Medici), the French, and the Spanish.  Charles V, with aid from the Spanish, led  a brutal sack of Rome in 1527. Pope Clement VII, humiliated by his defeat engineered a deal placing his Kinsman, and illegitimate great-grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent in control of Florence in 1530 although he was quickly dislodged again in 1537. It was then that, against all odds, his distant cousin Cosimo de’ Medici  (told you he’d be back) consolidated his position and emerged as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. Less than two decades later, the new duchy appropriated their long-time rival, Siena.

Cosimo’s success was rooted in a more realistic approach to Government, one in which a single man could be seen as the focus of ancient ideals. The artist and architect Giorgio Vasari, a native of Arezzo, proved the propagandist of the regime. In his Lives of the Artists, he used the term Renaissance for the first time to describe a movement that exulted Florence and the Medici as inspiration of artistic genius, setting the tone of art history for generations. Cosimo has moved to the Palazzo Vecchio in 1540 t0 confirm his control of the city and Vasari masterminded the redecoration of the Salone dei Cinquecento (where the Republican assembly of the 1490s had met) to glorify the new regime, its victories, and territories. He also created the Duchy’s offices, the Uffizi, with its Renaissance ‘street’ running down to the Arno and the corridor which runs across the Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, bought for the family by Cosimo’s wife Eleanor in 1549, eventually becoming the centre of the Tuscan Court.

In 1565, Cosimo’s son Francesco was married to Joana of Austria, sister of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. The marriage was celebrated in lavish style as befitted a small but illustrious kingdom brought to fruition by Medici Rule. It was the first of several marriages into European royalty which were celebrated with ever increasing panache in Florence as the economy declined. Few of the marriages were happy or fruitful and Tuscany was never again to play a major part of the European stage. The Mediterranean began to stagnate as the centres of manufacture shifted to Northern Europe and trade looked further afield to Asia and the Americas.