Pervading the commune’s social and moral policies in these decades was concern for the city’s sanctification and its standing before the Almighty. Care of widows and orphans, provision of dowries, and promotion of marriage were among its benign manifestations. But it also generated a need to purify the city, to cleanse it of those behaviors and persons that might cause a loss of divine favor. Purification needs scapegoats, who in fifteenth-century Florence included both sodomites and women. A law of 1433 thundered against “the barbarous and irrepressible bestiality of women” and their “reprobate and diabolical nature” that forces men to “submit to them.” Blaming men’s reluctance to marry on women’s inordinate desire for “expensive ornaments,” the law was another in a long series of attempts to regulate dress and its attendant expenditures: at least thirty-three sumptuary laws were passed in Florence in the fourteenth century, and twenty-five more in the fifteenth.59 But the earlier emphasis on benefits to the treasury from fines levied for violations of prohibitions against excessive opulence was now subordinated to moral concerns. Dramatic moralizing and scapegoating also accompanied the commune’s supervision of sexual misconduct in convents through a magistracy created in 1421. Adopting the same theology of an angry God punishing the whole
Gavitt, Charity and Children, pp. 61-105.
ASF, Provvisioni, Registri, 121, ff. 78v-79 (October 29, 1430).
C. Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200-1500 (Oxford, 2002), p. 28.
World for the sins of the depraved, a 1435 prohibition against relations with nuns and access to convents began by invoking the Day of Judgment and its “angry judge” when the “worthy” will be welcomed into paradise and the “unworthy, accursed ones” consigned to the “eternal fire. . . with an infinite number of demons.” Remarkably, here too the purity of the family is declared to be at stake, because nuns, as “brides of God,” were violating holy matrimony. “Natural law has ordained that the human species should multiply and that man and woman be joined together by holy matrimony, [which] is and should be of such gravity and dignity that it should be respected by everyone. Nothing is more pleasing to God than the preservation of matrimony; nothing is more displeasing to him than its violation.” Because of the failings of nuns through “carnal desire,” “divine providence is perturbed and has afflicted the world with the evils of wars, disorders, epidemics, and other calamities and troubles.”60 Widely (and wildly) promoted fears of the dangers threatening the purity of the republic were no doubt necessary to preserve the unity of the civic family and protect unquestioning acceptance of its patriarchal leadership.
In these same years, the government adopted novel policies toward homosexual relations and prostitution. A flourishing homosocial culture had developed in Florence in which men formed friendships and liaisons within only partly concealed networks of sociability in shops, taverns, and even churches. Long-term relationships were rare, occasional encounters the norm. Those who engaged in homosexual acts generally divided into two distinct age groups with different sexual roles. Young men between the ages of roughly eighteen and thirty took the dominant, or active, role in encounters in which they penetrated, but were not penetrated by, passive partners who were largely adolescents and teenaged boys. Among those accused of sodomy, 90% of passive partners were eighteen or younger and 83% of active partners nineteen or older. As boys passed the threshold of their eighteenth or nineteenth year, most gave up the passive role and became active partners with younger boys. And as young men went past the age of thirty, and especially if they married, most abandoned the homosexual practices of their youth. Homosexual relations between adult men were less common, but not exactly rare. Three-quarters of active partners were unmarried, which suggests that for the majority of men marriage deterred further involvement in homosexuality, but the one-quarter of active partners who were married shows that, for a substantial minority, homosexuality and marriage were not incompatible. Homosexual practices were not an alternative, and certainly not a permanent, sexual preference: the vast majority of those who engaged in them did not do so to the exclusion of sex with women or for their whole lives. But many did for some part of
Their lives, and they came from all levels of society. In fact, more came from either the elite or the artisan-working classes than from the upper ranks of the popolo. Men and/or boys accused of sodomy could be found in half of the 400 wealthiest families in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, but over 90% of the 110 richest families among these 400 had one or more accused. Among artisans and shopkeepers, accused sodomites came from a wide variety of professions, but teachers and students, despite the reputation given them by literary sources, accounted for only one-half of 1% of the accused and less than 1% of those convicted.296
Whether homosocial and homosexual relations increased after 1400 is difficult to say, but they certainly received more attention than before, from public authorities and moralists both lay and ecclesiastical. Intensifying fears of sodomy around 1400 were grounded in the assumption that Florentine men were avoiding marriage in preference for the pleasures of homosexuality or turning to the latter in the absence of marital sex because of the late age at which they married. Despite early laws prescribing severe penalties, including death, for sodomy, prosecutions were relatively rare in the fourteenth century and mostly limited to cases of abuse or rape of children. Just after the turn of the century, heightened fears put pressure on the government to do something about sodomy. In 1403 the legislative councils approved a proposal from the Signoria for the “elimination and extirpation” of sodomy, but what the law actually did was to institute the magistracy of the Officials of Decency (Ufficiali dell’Onesta) charged, not with punishing sodomy, but with supervising a new communal brothel, to which two more were added in 1415: if heterosexual outlets were provided for the city’s unmarried young men, so it was assumed, they would be lured away from sodomy. The Officials of Decency kept records of the women employed, protected them by prosecuting abusive clients, and occasionally fined the women for violating regulations concerning dress and prescribed locations. Most of the women were non-Florentines and even nonItalian. But if the purpose was to “save” Florentine men from homosexuality, the scheme didn’t work: more than half the men punished, who presumably reflected the overall clientele, were themselves non-Tuscans and 75% non-Florentines.297
In 1415 the newly redacted communal statutes underscored the need to suppress sodomy but took the approach that less severe penalties would permit more prosecutions and convictions. Over the next several years, other
Laws vested authority for the punishment of sodomites in a variety of courts. In 1418, “desiring to extirpate that vice of Sodom and Gomorrah, so contrary to nature that the anger of the omnipotent God is incited not only against the sons of men but also against the community and even inanimate objects,” the Signoria appointed a committee “to ponder and search their souls for ways and methods by which [sodomy] might be eradicated” from the city.63 But the anxious rhetoric produced only an ambivalent and halting record of legislation and enforcement, which suggests a city divided between zealots determined to repress sexual practices considered deviant and realists reluctant to see the government involved in the business of policing sexuality, no doubt in part because so many of their own sons were bound to be implicated in a more vigorous prosecution of sodomy.
It was in this tense situation that the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena came to Florence in 1424 and 1425 and devoted several long sermons of his Lenten cycles to the perils and evils of sodomy. As he had done and would later do elsewhere, Bernardino denounced sodomy, with captivating rhetoric and a whole panoply of biblical, patristic, moral, and social arguments, as the worst of all sins, as an offense against nature, indeed as more offensive to God than any other sin, and repulsive even to the devil himself. In many cities his sermons were influential in mobilizing fears and persuading governments to pass tougher anti-sodomy laws. Bernardino explicitly linked sodomy to the demographic crisis and blamed it on what he saw as the dysfunctional aspects of contemporary families. On the first point, he was sure of the cause-and-effect relationship but less so of whether others had grasped it: “You don’t understand,” he said in a 1424 sermon, “that this is the reason you have lost half your population over the last twenty-five years. Tuscany has the fewest people of any country in the world, solely on account of this vice.” Sodomites who refused to father children were guilty of “filicide” and murder of the unborn. Most extraordinary, however, were Bernardino’s denunciations of mothers and fathers as responsible for the homoerotic inclinations of their sons. Mothers, he insisted, dressed up young sons to make them look pretty and alluring, in the process rendering them effeminate and even more appealing to older sodomites and receptive to their attentions. They thus spoiled their sons and robbed them of their masculinity. Fathers were also to blame. Referring to the “coldness of paternal love,” Bernardino criticized their frequent absence and indifference as major reasons why their young sons turned to sodomy. He painted a picture of permissiveness and indulgence on the part of mothers, and of inadequate parental, and especially paternal, supervision, such that by the age of eighteen these unruly sons were like “unbridled horses, with no fear
Of God or of the saints or of mothers or parents.”298 How accurate Bernardino’s diagnosis was is difficult to say, since he certainly exaggerated for rhetorical and hortatory effect. Wealthy Florentines did spend large sums on clothes, which functioned as conspicuous advertisements of wealth,299 and fifteenth-century paintings offer many examples of sumptuously dressed and androgynously beautiful boys. If Bernardino’s assumption that mothers were the chief influence over sons while fathers remained emotionally distant is accurate, the period’s frequent praise of stern paternal guidance and love may actually have been prompted by the fear that mothers had too much power because of the aloofness of fathers. If Florentine children, even beyond infancy, knew their mothers far better than they did their fathers, one reason was certainly that many mothers were approximately equidistant in age between their eldest children and their husbands. While Bernardino’s explanations for the prevalence of sodomy were probably not correct, in the process of finding someone to blame he may have put his finger on real pathologies and dysfunctions in Florentine families.
In April 1432 the Signoria proposed and the councils instituted (by substantial but not unopposed majorities of 189-39 and 199-25) the Officials of the Night, an annually elected magistracy of six citizens, who had to be married and at least forty-five years of age, charged with receiving anonymous accusations against sodomites and selecting those they deemed sufficiently serious and credible to warrant investigation, interrogation, and a judgment.300 Convictions required a confession, or two eyewitnesses, or four people willing to certify that the alleged acts were a matter of public knowledge. The Night Officials almost never convicted minors, concentrating instead on the older, active partners; workers, artisans and minor guildsmen had a greater chance of being convicted than did persons from elite families. Between 1432 and 1502, when the office was abolished, the Officials received more than 15,000 accusations (over 200 per year) and handed down approximately 2,400 convictions. Most of those convicted were punished with fines (50 florins for initial convictions and 100, 200, and 500 florins for subsequent convictions), a few by public humiliation, prison, or exile, while only a handful received death sentences for assault or rape of children. Jurisdiction over violent crimes, including homosexual assault and rape, was shared by the courts of the podesta, Capitano, and Esecutore (the latter until its abolition in 1435), as well as the magistracy of the Otto di Guardia (Eight of Ward), but even counting the death sentences decreed by these courts brings the total number of men executed for crimes associated with sodomy to about six in the eighty years between 1420 and 1500.301
Although the Night Officials neither eliminated sodomy nor punished it with particular severity, they had, and used, broad authority to investigate consensual homosexual acts brought to their attention by anonymous accusers. Their policing of sodomy displayed the paradox of a policy that implicated and embarrassed many citizens, collected sizeable sums from at least some of those convicted, but stopped short of applying the kinds of penalties that might have deterred men and boys from the practice of sodomy. Convictions rose from eight in their first year to thirty-seven in 1435 and then declined: an average of thirteen per year until the 1460s, when they increased significantly, reaching their highest levels in the first five years of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s leadership when 535 men were convicted.302 The fact that convictions peaked in 1435, the first year of the Medici regime, again in Lorenzo’s shaky early years beginning in 1469, in 1480 after the Pazzi conspiracy, and in the precarious first (and only full) year of leadership of Lorenzo’s son Piero, strongly suggests that the prosecution of sodomy was used as a political weapon. But its larger significance lies in the acceptance of a regime of surveillance and of the government’s right and duty to discipline, punish, and shame those who engaged in sexual practices it could neither ignore nor suppress. Thousands of anonymous accusations, investigations, and interrogations resulted in social opprobrium for the “guilty,” a sense of vindicated indignation for citizens who accused them out of a combination of civic duty, fear, and moralistic fervor, and a useful way for the Medici regime to intimidate opponents. The strange story of the policing of sodomy in Florence shows a city divided between defenders of morality and advocates (obviously not limited to those who practiced the “abominable vice”) of a laissez-faire attitude willing to leave such matters to private consciences.
World History
