The second vital motif for Petrarch’s dislike of his own era consisted in the political situation of his native country. Italy was politically fragmented. Alongside the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, which were under Spanish and French reign, the Church State, the mighty seafaring republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, as well as regional centers of power such as Milan and Florence, there were also dozens of autonomous city states in central and northern Italy. Armed conflicts and skirmishes between the innumerable political organisms were the order of the day. What is more, they were internally rekindled by endless factional controversies, rebellions, expulsions, and forceful attempts of repatriation.
From early on, Petrarch had been sadly acquainted with this pitiful reality through the fate of his own family. Accordingly, his diagnosis was as outspoken as it was harsh: ‘‘In our times, Italy groans like a slave’’ (Sine nomine, 102). The much-required therapy was to be accordingly radical: even in politics, ancient Rome and its extraordinary greatness were to be exemplary, since during the Roman world dominion there had been peace and tranquility, and justice and virtue had thrived to the full. The practical consequences of which meant that the fragmentary state of Italy should be overcome and the unity of Italy, which in antiquity had been enacted from Rome, should be restored. Also, foreign rule was to be abolished and the old autonomy regained.
To reach the first scope, Petrarch set high hopes in Charles IV, who in 1347 became King of Bohemia and in 1355 Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. By alluding to the exemplary Gaius Iulius Caesar, Petrarch beseeched him to meet his ‘‘highest and most holy duty’’ by uniting Italy in peace and tranquility (Ad Carolum quartum, 374/376). Using all his Ciceronian eloquence and a broad repertoire of classical Roman literature (e. g., Ad Carolum quartum, 488-500) from 1351 onward Petrarch assailed Charles ever and again for an entire decade, but to no avail.
There was no expecting the monarch from the House of Luxemburg to help realize the second goal, since he himself was merely another foreign prince, a ‘‘princeps externus’’ (Ad Carolum quartum, 374). A few years previously Petrarch had indeed nourished high hopes. On the occasion of the rebellion organized by Cola di Rienzo, in 1347 the city of Rome, the ‘‘capital of Italy’’, had been freed from the rule of foreigners stemming from ‘‘some despicable corner of the world’’ (A Cola di Rienzo e al popolo romano, 76/78, 90). Petrarch, who enthusiastically supported Cola, was quite confident that this incidence would set an example and that Italy, which was currently wasting away, would rise up and end its servitude (A Cola di Rienzo e al popolo romano, 76, 90). But in the very same year Cola’s rule collapsed miserably, crushing with it Petrarch’s own high hopes.
Petrarch did not manage to directly improve the political situation in Italy. However, he was the first to develop the political project of freeing his native country and building a national unity, a scope that was only to be realized much later, in the mid-nineteenth century. But his aspirations remained constantly present in the ‘‘collective mind’’ of Italy. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that Machiavelli lets his Principe, this early sixteenth-century work propagating the same political program, end with a quote by Petrarch himself!
See also: > Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions > Augustine > Church Fathers > Metaphysics > Natural Philosophy > Peter Lombard > Philosophical Theology, Byzantine > Platonism
World History
