The half-century from the 1380s to the 1430s is the watershed of Florence’s republican history. Realignments among the classes transformed politics, intellectual life, social attitudes, and institutions. More changed in these decades than in the previous hundred years. As guild republicanism gradually gave way to consensus regimes under elite leadership, Florence expanded its dominion in Tuscany and began playing a more decisive role as a territorial and military power. Whereas its fourteenth-century wars were relatively brief, the longest being the three-year conflicts with Mastino Della Scala and the papacy, Florence was nearly constantly at war between 1390 and 1454, except in the decade 1414-23. War and the myths needed to sustain it assumed unprecedented importance and generated a patriotic ideology combining a celebration of Florence’s domination of Tuscany with its self-assigned duty to defend republican liberty. Within Florence, government authority to police and control, discipline and punish, provide charity and assistance, and enforce norms of behavior and morality significantly expanded. Homosexuality, prostitution, religious behavior, conspicuous consumption, dowries, and marriage all became objects of government regulation and surveillance. Pressures toward social conformity emerged from the ideological needs of consensus politics in a time of near permanent war. And in this same halfcentury, humanism and the cult of antiquity occupied center stage in cultural life, as citizens and humanists alike appropriated the ancient wisdom of the “studies of humanity” to refashion ideals of citizenship and republican liberty and virtue.
World History
