Cosimo’s government survived under the patronage, protection, and implicit threat of imperial power.716 Until 1543 Charles’s garrisons held the Fortezza and the key fortresses of the dominion; his armies in Milan and Naples were ready to intervene at any sign of trouble; and he demanded heavy subventions for his wars elsewhere in Europe.717 Papal hostility under Paul III (1534-49) and French support for Piero Strozzi and the exiles kept the duchy dependent on Charles, and nearly every aspect of Cosimo’s government was conditioned by this dependence. Because his authority derived from imperial decrees of 1530, their reconfirmation at Naples in 1536, and Charles’s grant of the ducal title in September 1537, Cosimo could claim that he was not bound by the laws of the republic, by the constitutional reform of 1532, or by the restrictions attached to his election. Nonetheless, especially in the early years, he ruled through magistracies and laws that, except for the suppression of the priorate, remained largely unchanged. Indeed, the statutes of 1415 remained in force into the eighteenth century. Cosimo brought profound changes to Florentine government and political culture, but they occurred piecemeal, tentatively, experimentally, and through existing institutions. He assumed de facto legislative sovereignty without any formal revision of constitutional principles, as laws began to be promulgated first with the pro-forma approval of the Magistrato Supremo and the councils and then simply in his own name. Cosimo eventually turned the Magistrato Supremo into an appeals court and an extension of his jurisdiction.718 When he succinctly stated in 1558 about one of his edicts that the law “we ourselves have made. . . invalidates every [prior] statute and was made for the whole state,”719 he declared both that his decrees overrode existing legislation and applied to all his dominions, not just to Florence. Individual edicts, called bandi (including those prohibiting the possession of arms and unauthorized assembly and severely punishing contacts with exiles), claimed priority in both senses, but he neither abrogated the republican statutes in toto nor extended a uniform law code over all his territories.
Cosimo also modified the exercise of executive power. Chief among the innovations was the institution (or increased prominence) of “auditori” who oversaw various areas of governance as his personal representatives, conveying his wishes and orders to the magistracies, and reporting to him anything he needed to know. They included the auditore delle riformagioni, who presided over the 200 and Senate and superintended ducal rights within the dominion; the auditore fiscale, who supervised criminal courts from which the government collected monetary penalties (particularly the Otto di Guardia e Balia), sometimes overturned their rulings, initiated new proceedings, and handed down decisions on his own; and the auditore della giurisdizione (instituted in 1532), who protected ducal jurisdiction, particularly against ecclesiastical claims. In practice, the assignments of the auditori were vaguely defined, overlapping, and always ad hoc, but this flexibility was also the key to their effectiveness. Cosimo used them whenever and wherever he needed to impose his will against councils, magistracies, or courts. When, in 1556, the auditore fiscale Alfonso Quistelli, authorized by Cosimo to intervene in “serious cases” before the Otto, asked him to clarify what he meant by “serious cases,” Cosimo refused to be constrained by definitions: “We will order you [to intervene] from time to time whenever we learn that some injustice is about to occur.”720
But auditori could exercise considerable influence in the areas assigned to them. In 1549 the auditore fiscale Jacopo Polverini drafted the law, known as “la Polverina,” punishing opposition to Cosimo as laesa maiestas and threatening capital punishment for any intention to harm the duke or even failure to report such intentions in others.
Unlike the traditional rotating civilian committees that served for short terms, the auditori were trained in law and held their posts for as long as Cosimo had confidence in them. And they were never Florentines. Polverini was from Prato and was followed as auditore fiscale by Alfonso Quistelli from Mirandola in 1556 and Aurelio Manni of Siena in 1565. Polverini was also auditore delle riformagioni and was followed by Francesco Vinta of Volterra in 1556 and Vinta’s son Paolo in 1570. Lelio Torelli from Fano in the Marche was auditore della giurisdizione from 1546 to 1576. Cosimo also made use of secretaries whose roles evolved from those of similar functionaries employed by the Medici before 1527. Francesco Campana was Duke Alessandro’s “primo segretario” and continued under Cosimo until he died in 1546. He was succeeded by Torelli, who, as both first secretary and an auditore, became in effect Cosimo’s chief minister. Torelli presided over and expanded the staff of secretaries (there were ten by 1551), assigning them specific areas of responsibility such as state philanthropy, hospitals, ducal correspondence, and even diplomatic missions.721 Like the auditori, the secretaries came from anywhere and everywhere within and beyond the dominion (e. g., San Miniato, Pescia, Volterra, Bibbiena), except Florence, and their origins and the powers they had over citizen councils and committees testify to Cosimo’s reluctance to trust Florentines, especially the ottimati. Members of the old elite continued to fill the councils and the judicial, financial, and administrative committees but were steadily deprived of power by the authority of the auditori and the bureaucratic permanence of the secretaries. Particularly revealing of the diminished independence of the citizen committees is the Otto di Guardia,722 whose jurisdiction was particularly crucial to maintaining public order, suppressing dissent, and criminalizing opposition to Cosimo’s government and person: crucial tasks that could not be left to citizens whose patronage ties and marriage alliances might yield politically or socially inflected justice, whether toward leniency or severity. In 1558 Cosimo had his auditore Quistelli dismiss the entire board of the Otto in the middle of their term because of a decision he did not like.723 Auditori became instruments of Cosimo’s personal intervention and oversight in all aspects of government and an extension of his sovereignty. In 1545 he created an inner cabinet, the Pratica Segreta, consisting of the auditori, the two chief financial officials, and two members of the magistracy that administered the dominion (all ducal appointees), and in 1550 instituted a supreme civil and criminal court, the Consulta, which also included the auditori and an unspecified number of other appointees. Here too a useful overlapping of responsibilities permitted Cosimo to use the Pratica and the Consulta flexibly, and it was with these bodies, not the Magistrato Supremo staffed by ottimati, that he discussed and decided government policy.
Like most Renaissance princedoms, the Medici duchy trumpeted an ideal of impartial, fair, and speedy justice: equal justice to all classes and standardization of norms, procedures, and penalties throughout the dominion. “An excellent prince,” begins a 1545 law, “should strive for nothing with greater zeal or vigilance than for justice equitably administered among all his subjects according to their rights and their transgressions.” A 1558 law establishing new penalties for sexual violence proclaimed that “justice requires that all those guilty of the same crime be punished in the same way” and that punishments be applied “equally against any person of whatsoever estate, rank, dignity, or condition.”724 Thus in 1543 the penalties specified in the Florentine statutes for violent crimes were extended to the entire dominion, and in 1549 all dominion magistrates inflicting capital or corporal punishments were required to submit their decisions for review to the magistracy of the Conservatori di Legge and in 1550 also to the Otto. Interventions by the auditori also pursued the same goal. Yet the duchy maintained the jurisdictional structures inherited from the republic, including the complex grid of judicial districts in the dominion (the podesterie, capitanati, and vicariati) with their varying mixes of civil, criminal, and appeals jurisdiction, and continued the practice of sending Florentine citizens (mostly from the elite) to serve in these districts for limited periods. And it kept the Ruota, the civil court of appeal created in 1502 and staffed by non-Florentine jurists, now appointed by Cosimo, with jurisdiction over the entire dominion. Compilations of statutory law negotiated with the separate localities under the republic also remained in force, as did a series of privileges and partial jurisdictional autonomies. A surprising number of fiefs, including five with limited autonomy created by Cosimo himself, and many more of imperial origin with varying degrees of immunity from Florentine
Map 3 Boundaries and principal cities and towns of the contado and district of Florence and the grand ducal state of Tuscany in 1574 (based on the map by E. Fasano Guarini, enclosed in The Journal of Italian History vol. 2, n. 2 [1979])
Law and taxes dotted the ducal dominions. Apologists and admiring Venetian ambassadors extolled the “incomparable justice” administered by the duke’s “expert, experienced, and intelligent men,” but observers closer to the ground frequently complained of justice delayed and distorted. In 1546 a sharp reduction of the personnel of dominion magistrates aimed at cutting expenses and increasing magistrates’ income. In the regions farthest from the capital, in the Maremma in the southwest and the mountains to the north and east, the lack of sufficient police and bureaucracy led to worsening banditry, which reached crisis proportions by the 1580s.
Nor did the duchy achieve the intention of subjecting city, contado, and district in equal degree to uniform jurisdiction. To the extent that there was an integrated territorial state (but actually two states, since the “stato vecchio” of Florence and the “stato nuovo” of Siena after 1555 remained legally and administratively distinct entities) (see Map 3) it was more the republic’s legacy than Cosimo’s creation.46 Cosimo sought to bring law and administration under centralized supervision, but he did not standardize them, and even attempts at centralized control of still largely disparate systems sometimes met with resistance as localities guarded their traditional autonomies. A good example is the attempt to bring the dominion’s hospitals (over a thousand, many of them tiny) all under the supervision of the magistracy of the Capitani del Bigallo, instituted in 1542 and staffed largely by the old elite. But the Capitani’s demand for a full accounting of the hospitals’ properties and finances, and for payment to the ducal treasury of surplus earnings, was largely ignored. Accepting the reality of this resistance, Cosimo decided not to waste resources and deprived the Bigallo captains of the bureaucratic staff they needed to enforce their reforms. Instead, in 1560 he created the Nine Conservatori of the Jurisdiction and Dominion to oversee appointed chancellors whose presence was required in each locality’s councils. The Nine and their chancellors supervised local institutions, including hospitals, but did not intervene in their finances or collect revenue. They cast a wider but looser net than that of the Bigallo captains and allowed communities to continue running their own hospitals and much else, just as the republic had done.47
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