The Republics of Ideas: Venice, Florence and the Defence of Liberty, 1525–1530

Abstract

The sixteenth century has often been regarded as a crucial period in the history of political events in Italy, and in the history of political ideas. The contributions of Florence and Venice to this process have long been acknowledged. Florentine admiration for the Venetian political system reflected internal political instability in the former city. The evidence for Venetian-Florentine contacts, and for a Venetian concern or admiration for Florence has been less noted. This article aims to show that there is evidence that Venetian concern for the defence of republican liberty after 1525 was allied to an awareness of Florentine political events and their significance for Venetian political practices. This awareness was stimulated by the pressure of imperial intervention on the peninsula after 1525. Florence and Venice were allies under the treaty of Cognac, and diplomats in both cities articulated a concern for republican libertas in Italy and an antipathy towards imperial rule. The work of Gasparo Contarini can be placed in this context, and as a result the critical point in the development of his arguments about Venetian political stability can be placed in the 1520s rather than in the years around 1509. The politics and political ideas of both cities were therefore developed in a wider context than has hitherto been supposed.

Between Statecraft and Humanism: Diplomacy and Its Forms of Knowledge

“…For Queller, the relazioni were “generally straightforward, businesslike, and only very moderately given to literary adornment,” and this misconception leads him, for example, to criticize the “pretentiousness” of Marco Foscari's relazione on Florence—“full of learned allusions” (1973:182). By contrast, for other Renaissance scholars, Foscari's relazione is paradigmatic, “a tour de force” (Bowd :413).…”

Virtues and institutions as the foundations of a res publica in Wawrzyniec Goślicki and Gasparo Contarini

“…It "became the great source that fed republican thought in monarchical centuries" (Gilbert, 1967, p. 184), an inspiration for many political theorists in Italy and beyond, especially in Poland and England in accordance with Contarini's wish which he clearly expressed. In Florence Savonarola sought to remodel the Florentine polity on Venetian principles (Bowd, 2000), whereas in England James Harrington took the Venetian institutional framework of government as a model of an enduring political order free of factional politics (Wootton, 1994;Worden, 1994) and his work, inspired by Contarini, was to have a significant impact upon the American Founding Fathers, thus making Contarini at least an indirect source of influence upon American constitutionalism. For the Polish -Lithuanian Commonwealth, however, the model of Venice served to confirm the righteousness of its own political and institutional choice that led to the establishment of a republican order that was expected to be equal in greatness to that of both Rome and Venice (Pietrzyk-Reeves, 2012).…”