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In 1070, when Lanfranc left his abbacy at Caen to become Archbishop of Canterbury, he was probably about 60 years old — by medieval standards an advanced age. In Lombardy, and then in Normandy, he had had a long and varied experience of lay, monastic, and general church life, and not least of the aspirations and concerns of the early reform papacy and of secular rulers who, for whatever reason, had sympathy with them. At each stage of his life he had demonstrated his ability to adapt himself with integrity and effectiveness to the demands that he encountered. A cardinal feature of Lanfranc's monastic years as prior of Bec and as abbot of Caen was his close and sympathetic relationship with the reform popes of the time, especially Leo IX, Nicholas II, and Alexander II, all of whom held him in high regard.

The musical repertories Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto published suggest a spirit of cooperative enterprise among 16th-century Venetian music printers. Using specific case studies, this chapter explores the various business strategies the two dynastic presses observed from the refashioning of reprinted editions and the creation of multi-volume series to the sub-specialization of musical genres and acquisition of clients and music from different locations. Gardano looked to Ferrara, Rome, and transalpine centers, while Scotto cultivated links with Lombardy, Mantua, and Trent, as well as Naples and Sicily. Later printing firms of Claudio Merulo and Francesco Rampazetto also demonstrate connections with the two dynastic presses.

This chapter discusses the influence of Pietro Verri on the economic debate in Lombardy. It also investigates how Verri formulated his economic thoughts. It explains that the key engine and fuel to drive economic development was conspicuous consumption. It discusses how and why Verri abandoned the concept of luxury as the cornerstone of economic development. It notes the new theories of economic development introduced by both Verri and Beccaria into Italian discussion — the concept of savings, productive investment, the pivotal role of the cost of money, capitalist agriculture, and the division of labour in a demand-driven economy. It explains that Verri and Beccaria also helped develop a language in which these mechanisms were to be expressed — the new language of economic reason.

This chapter begins by discussing the factors that caused the reforms that occurred in Lombardy. It then narrates that most of the reforms were decided upon in Vienna or by the imperial officers in Milan. It explains that the Lombard elite held important positions in the state of Milan from which the influence could be exerted. It shows how the new rulers first drew upon the old to participate with their traditional training in jurisprudence. By demonstrating the case of Pietro Verri and his father, Gabriele, this chapter explains that the newcomers had to fight against the old ones in order to establish themselves, and the struggle was as much a discontinuity in government participation as a break between generations. It also discusses that the Il Caffè became the voice of enlightenment. It describes Lombardy's optimism regarding agricultural economy and the ruralisation of industry and manufacture.

This chapter examines Spain's armies in the reign of Carlos II, seeking to show that the king had large numbers of men under arms. It explores how men were recruited for those armies, both at home and abroad, how effectively they were supplied, and how they fought. The chapter also discusses the quality of Spain's armies, and especially that of its high command.

This chapter looks at the place Venice and its hinterland assumed within broader imperial policy. It examines its role both within Metternich's defensive and diplomatic strategy, and within debates on economic and commercial issues. Underpinning this discussion is a consideration of how the authorities in Vienna viewed Venetians (in the sense of both veneziani and veneti), and how Venetians viewed not only their Austrian rulers, but other neighbours both within and without imperial frontiers. It is stressed that Venetians were more likely to see fellow Italians from Trieste or Lombardy as threatening to their interests than the German-speaking officials who were largely responsible for taking decisions about the region.

Austrian censorship, while milder than that of most Italian states in the post-Napoleonic era, was nevertheless oppressive and unenlightened. The attempt to circle the citizens of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia with a cordon sanitaire to prevent contact with dangerous ideas was not only ineffective, but counterproductive: grievances about censorship ultimately assumed a major place in the opposition to Austrian rule.

In the kingdom of Italy and in the church and city of Rome, Pope Gregory VII's intentions, actions, and degree of success showed differences from region to region. For the most part, Gregory showed prudence and insight in his appreciation of differing situations. When a cautious and accommodating approach was called for, as for example in his dealings with Aquileia and Venice, Gregory showed a moderation and willingness to settle for what he could hope to achieve, which were statesmanlike and conducive to his advantage. In Lombardy, by contrast, the recalcitrance of the Lombard bishops and the militancy of the Patarenes led Gregory into a stance of confrontation and zealous partisanship in regional affairs. Also in Tuscany, he found allies who seemed to meet his own requirements of lay figures and of churchmen. At Rome itself, Gregory was for most of his pontificate successful in maintaining his position by ways of moderation, of not raising contentious issues in religious or civic terms, and of not pressing the more radical aspects of his rule.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Italy's network of cities, which reflects its cultural and political identity. At the beginning of the eleventh century, the municipal phenomenon exploded in the center-north of the peninsula; the cities proposed to take over as centers of self-government and control of territory. Nobles and merchants in the city joined their interests and created a more or less coherent system of domination over the economic and alimentary resources of the countryside: the countryside produces; the city directs the produce to the urban market, and gives it the denomination of its own identity; then, the urban market distributes the product in a commercial space. As of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, various cities in Emilia and Lombardy, for example, associated their names to a particular cheese, known as parmigiano, piacentino, or lodigiano, according to the local variety.

French and German influences combined in early Italian Romanticism, but the focus continued to be the problem of foreign rule and political disunity. Added to this was the absence of a common Italian language, in contrast to the wide use of Castilian in Spain and the successful imposition of French in France. The role of the Papacy and the position of the Catholic Church quickly became a focus of nationalist and liberal critique. Into this situation came Manzoni, an ardent Catholic sympathetic to liberalism and the national cause, and a leading figure in the search for a workable national language. Influenced by medievalists such as Fauriel and Sismondi, Manzoni’s early works examined medieval history in drama and historiography. Italian historical novelists, among them D’Azeglio, used medieval and early sixteenth-century themes in order to heighten national consciousness. Manzoni’s ‘The Betrothed’, influenced in part by Scott, opted for a realistic social and local canvas at the time of Spanish rule in Lombardy in the middle period of the Thirty Years’ War. Although not directly oriented towards the nationalist goal, this work was later adopted by liberal nationalists as a founding text. The book was a critique of the abuse of personal power. The novel’s Catholic roots ran deep. Manzoni, who had first made his name in drama and poetry, and had written history in order to explain his play on the Lombards in Italy, included a great deal of history in his historical novel.

This chapter focuses on the first stage of reform and the direct rule of the Austrian Habsburgs, from the early eighteenth century, in Lombardy. It highlights the powerful axis with an agenda of reform for Milan and Lombardy. The local nobility was at first hesitant or even hostile, and some of them remained so, but there were also individuals and groups who themselves nurtured ambitious plans for reform, and saw the attractions of service in the imperial administration. The 'Lombardian Enlightenment' was the product of the working together of these two forces. The chapter also examines the period of maximum cooperation between the imperial power and the progressive aristocracy of Milan and Lombardy in the 1760s and 1770s. Ultimately, it discusses the most progressive nobles during the time and the house of Count Pietro Verri: the self-styled Accademia dei Pugni or 'Academy of Fisticuffs.'

This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage their assets when fleeing to “Lombardy,” that is, to northern and central Italy. From there, Italian refugees exported the newly invented financial instruments north of the Alps, where bankers and moneylenders were called “Lombards,” a name eventually given to a public square in Amsterdam. Cleirac's merging of these spaces has the effect of tracing a direct line between fourteenth-century Lombards and seventeenth-century Amsterdam and makes pawnbroking appear contiguous with the most sophisticated forms of financial credit developed during the sixteenth century. This chronological compression is crucial to Cleirac's rhetorical strategy of making medieval Jewish moneylenders, the object of scorn and prejudice, interchangeable with the international merchant-bankers of the seventeenth century.

This chapter attempts to measure the real impact of Giuseppe Micali on the political culture of the Risorgimento, testing the importance of his work Storia degli antichi popoli italiani on the studies of the Italic past published in several areas around the peninsula, especially in Lombardy (which remained the main Italian publishing centre), Naples, and Sicily. The analysis shows the multiple and different nationalizing uses of Micali’s works in tthese regions and confirms how his reading of a cultural, rather than ethnic, uniformity of the Italian people, was overwhelmingly accepted by the patriots on the eve of 1848. Micali’s model appeared, in fact, the only one that could be followed in a country which, though culturally united for centuries, was at the same time deprived of any political cohesion.

This chapter examines the development of other Italian communes in order to elucidate what city leaders thought they were doing when they moved into the new communal world. Emphasis is given to a range of urban experiences in fifteen or so other cities, grouped regionally—Piemonte; Lombardy and Emilia; Romagna and the Veneto; and Tuscany. The chapter first considers Genoa and Asti, two cities that showed active early consuls, before turning to the communes of Lombardy and Emilia, Romagna and the Veneto, and Tuscany. It shows that the chronological pacing of communal development in Italy follows some recognizable geographical lines, that the degree to which communes were contested varied, and that the earliest documented communes had assemblies before they developed a consular leadership in any organized way. The chapter also explores the roles of families as communal leaders and how the rule of consuls became more institutionalized.

It was not in Francia but Lombardy that councils turned their attention to xenodochia, in what was to be the only sustained effort by Western law-makers to engage with welfare houses. This chapter explores their activity, which was the product of local concern, given voice through a new forum, the Carolingian council. It identifies a programme of reform initiated under Pope Hadrian I and then Charlemagne: restauratio, a call to restore the material inheritance of the landscape, especially buildings and public infrastructure. In Lombardy, the call brought xenodochia to the attention of councils who, over time, developed language and strategies by which to address these facilities. The Lombard capitularies offer a clear definition of xenodochia, one distinct from monasteries, which the chapter then teases out. It argues that a xenodochium was not a community but a material endowment, a gift dedicated in perpetuity to a specific task or tasks of Christian welfare. To councils, the central issue was its dispositio or institutio: the directives of a will-maker as enshrined in his or her testament. This provided a fixed constitution, particular to each xenodochium. A final section explores the implications for these findings on the character of a xenodochium’s endowment.

Having sketched the shape of the hospital in Carolingian Francia and Lombardy, the investigation now moves earlier, to uncover the legal foundations of welfare, as fostered under Roman law. This chapter redefines the tradition for welfare facilities in Roman law and identifies a distinctive Western legal model. It reappraises two extracts from Julian’s Epitome in the Collectio capitularium of Ansegis of Saint-Wandrille, the only evidence for Justinianic law in the West regarding hospitals. These are found not to relate to Carolingian welfare and new light is shed both on the palace’s use of these Roman law extracts and on the possible character of Ansegis’s book 2, on Louis the Pious’s ecclesiastical laws. The chapter then uses Justinian’s collections of law to explore the long development of welfare foundations in Roman law, finding them first accommodated under testamentary law. It argues that this basic testamentary model was moulded in the East, via the ‘pious promise’, into an institution under divine or public law. In the West, however, the early testamentary form was developed via the documentary practices that characterized Roman law in the West, c.400–800. These practices reveal a distinctive Western approach, which enshrined not the institution but the right to institute; that is, the right of the testator to prescribe and fix acts of human charity. A final section offers a new account of the development of welfare institutions in early Christianity, as East and West diverged and the West developed a vernacular Christian practice, one that was not owned by the church but enacted and developed by testators.