Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Vilna Bashi, William Connell, Susan Liebell, Ann Mische, John Padgett, Sidney Tarrow, and anonymous CSSH reviewers for their helpful comments, encouragement, and corrections.

In this letter, Donato Acciaiuoli, a politically prominent but not particularly wealthy member of an esteemed Florentine family, writes to Riccardo del Bene, a richer but younger co-resident of the neighborhood of Vipera, looking for an insider's assistance in keeping his tax burden down. Donato paints his economic position bleakly, unwittingly conforming in detail with prescriptions provided in the now-famous contemporaneous memoir of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, written to urge his own heirs to hide their wealth and dramatize the fiscal injustices done to them:

However, Acciaiuoli's relationship to the state is not so one-sided as Morelli's advice would lead us to believe. In fact, his letter exemplifies the widespread Florentine strategy of relying on personal relationships both as a defense against the demands of the state and as a means of remaining an active member of it. Florentine citizens were not merely subjects or “victims” of the state, but also its custodians. Thus, although Acciaiuoli protests that “anyone could see” the newly instituted tax law was simply unfair, he also alleges that he needs and wants del Bene's favor to continue to serve the commune honorably. He actively links personal and collective destinies: a favor to him is simultaneously a benefit to the commune. Loyalty between friends and loyalty to the collectivity are represented as mutually consistent.

Friendship and citizenship, patronage and the state—these were inextricably connected in a variety of ways in the Renaissance Florentine polity.³

First, fiscal pressures and fiscal institutional innovation in fifteenth-century Florence were very much interwoven with the consolidation of clientage-based politics. The catasto of 1427 (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985), the plethora of ingenious schemes for encouraging citizens to pay back-taxes (Conti 1984: passim), the Monte delle doti (or Dowry Fund; see Kirshner and Molho 1977; Molho 1994)—were arguably “modernizing” innovations. They certainly depended heavily upon the sophistication of Florentine accounting practices (de Roover 1966; Melis 1991; Epstein 2000a: ch.2), and were premised (in communal debates) on understanding the state as having needs aligned with, but also distinct from, the needs of the citizenry. But to deal with the burdens imposed by these schemes for tax collection, Florentine citizens frequently and routinely turned to their fellow citizens for assistance.⁴

The second aspect of the state/patronage nexus I wish to highlight is the way individual Florentines participated in both domains and managed these domains' disparate demands. As Conti (1984, esp. 119ff.) has documented, administrative change in the commune was accomplished within the constraints of a contest, not between state actors and civil society, but between citizens in their role as custodians of the state, and the same citizens in their role as subjects to the state. Members of the Florentine reggimento were fully implicated in, and had roles and identities based on, both sides of the (admittedly anachronistic) state/civil society conceptual divide.⁷

Consequently, the evolution of the early modern European state stalled in Florence, as many historians and comparative historical sociologists recognize. But this was not simply because of Florentines' overzealous commitment to capital or their lack of enthusiasm for erecting a territorial state, as Charles Tilly's (1992) model may suggest. Nor was it simply a function of the composition of classes and their distinct interests, as Hendrik Spruyt's (1994) model and, occasionally, Richard Lachmann's (2000) might lead us to believe. The stunted Florentine counterpart of the early modern state was not the product of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions, but the outcome of a number of concrete interactions (Molho 1996:103; Najemy 1991), both contentious (as emphasized by Tarrow 2004) and cooperative. And again, these happened at both the institutional and the individual level. Administrative innovations at the macro-level emerged and then were dismantled as an incremental and hesitant response to culturally shaped patterns at the micro-level of interaction in civil society. State institutions and interpersonal interaction styles co-evolved (Elias 1978).

Patronage, like other political cultures, was a “lived form” wherein “individuals reacted to constraints imposed by the emerging centralized state” (Ikegami 1995:8). As the demands of the state varied, so too did the cultural practices of patronage surge and vary. To elucidate this, the next section will summarize for non-specialists the vicissitudes of Florentine fiscal policy throughout the 1400s. Tracing the increases and decreases in state demands year by year provides a roadmap for selecting important periods in which to search for tax-related patronage correspondence. Such correspondence will reveal that the state and interpersonal relationships developed in a conjoined way. In the subsequent section, I will present and textually analyze a number of patronage letters pertaining to taxation and demonstrate changes in their content and style over the course of the fifteenth century. By means of these letters we may better understand both changes in the Florentine state and changes in interpersonal relations.

This analysis is made possible by the survival of tens of thousands of fifteenth-century letters in the Florentine state archives.⁸

The Ups and Downs of Florentine Taxation in the 1400s

The landscape of fifteenth-century Florentine fiscal policy is littered with innovations and reversals, all produced by a need, well recognized by citizen-legislators, to distribute the tax burden equitably and effectively. Molho (1971; 1996) and Conti (1984) provide outstanding detailed accounts of this history, and so here I will present only an analytical summary for non-specialists, highlighting two pairs of contrasting points.

First, to be eligible for communal office, one had to have contributed to the Monte Commune, the city's funded public debt, and paid one's taxes in full. Because the city was continually unable to pay off its debts,¹⁰

Second, however, many Florentines also feared the collective social and political consequences of taxation. Debates concerning the catasto—a method established in 1427 to assess taxes on the basis of extensive written inventories of household liquid assets and landed wealth (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985)—reveal that leading citizens valued the plan not only for its equity and efficiency, but also because, in the words of Francesco di Lorenzo Machiavelli, after its implementation “the conspiracies, false pretences, and clienteles of the most powerful citizens will come to an end” (Conti 1984:132, my translation). Averardo de' Medici, a banker deeply embedded in the patronage networks of the Florentine establishment, praised it because assessments would be determined on sure evidence rather than uncertainty clouded with favoritism; thus it would contribute to domestic peace. The debate over the catasto was undoubtedly marked with inter-elite, class-like tensions (cf. Lachmann 2000). For example, a number of merchants were afraid that including liquid capital in the estimates of wealth would burden them extraordinarily. However, the cleavages in the debate did not follow class lines in any simple way. Later in the century, too, Cosimo de' Medici would oppose tax plans—for example, the diecina graziosa of 1442–that might have benefited him personally but would have destabilized the regime. Nicolai Rubinstein (1997:161–62) reports that Florentine leaders considered backing off on electoral controls in 1458 in order to facilitate passage of a new tax bill; evidently they saw the two issues as intricately connected. And in 1480, in the aftermath of an attempt on Lorenzo de' Medici's life, when the regime proposed the adoption of yet another balìa (an executive body with extensive but fairly short-term powers that short-circuited participatory government), they secured consent for it with the promise of tax reform (Rubinstein 1997:226). The point is, it was not state officials standing outside of and acting upon society at large who debated fiscal policy, but rather citizens, discussing the apportionment of the tax burden amongst themselves. Theirs was a protracted effort to solve a key collective action problem of the polity, not a simple class battle.

The third point I will make is that one may postulate a certain governing dynamic to Florence's fiscal history. When the need for cash became more urgent, the imposition of forced loans grew, fewer citizens could meet these demands, and more of them had to pay discounted assessments and forego the interest owed to them. Alternatively, they could rely on others to pay on their behalf.¹²

My fourth point, however, is that this elegant governing dynamic overstates the clarity and unidirectionality of actual developments. The city faced dramatically different constraints over time; innovations did not stick. This led to a checkered history of oscillation back and forth between different off-the-shelf taxation procedures, between tax collection and tax relief,¹⁴

The figure records the year-by-year fluctuations in the volume of forced loans imposed, which in turn correspond fairly closely to annual variability in military expenditures.¹⁵

Florence's fluctuating tax burden, 1390–1480

Ground-Level Responses to Fiscal Demands

These laments made to tax officials by Filippo di Benedetto dei Nerli in 1442 and Matteo di Giovanni Strozzi in 1451, respectively, demonstrate how Florentines felt about the periodically egregious tax assessments of the commune. They also provide some evidence of state tactics, and of certain strategies Florentines adopted to cope with state demands. Expropriation and imprisonment are hardly the benign acts of a weak state. And yet the state's often ingenious efforts to collect funds from the citizenry continually drove citizens to seek financial help from their fellow citizens, with the consequent reinforcement of interpersonal attachments that posed a challenge to the state.

In what follows I present more than a dozen letters, all in one way or another about problems with taxes. They are presented in chronological order so that readers can follow several changes that occurred over time. One was a shift from citizens being proactive in reducing tax assessments to their becoming more reactive, asking for assistance in paying debts already owed. A second was that the balance between expressions of desert and expressions of deference shifted toward the latter after 1434, at least in letters addressed to members of the Medici family. Third, there appears to be a move away from writing to people who were directly involved in the taxation process and toward seeking help from those only indirectly involved. The latter two changes jive well with what historians have recognized for some time: that there was a concentration in the personalistic practice of power in Medicean Florence. Extra-institutional channels had arisen to challenge state administrative control over fiscal outcomes, thus weakening the autonomous power of the state.

However, we will also see that there was over time a consistent pattern whereby the problem of tax collection was linked to performance in office and/or the desire to hold office. This link existed at the level of communal policy, and consequently it is found also in the substance and rhetoric of interpersonal interactions. The relationship of Florentines to the state was both adversarial and participatory, and this is an absolutely critical factor in understanding why rationalization and autonomization of the Florentine state stalled. The margins for state action were always tightly constrained by the competing (but shifting) involvements of Florentine citizen participants.

This article began with Donato Acciaiuoli's letter of 1409, a year of heightened taxation. The next such year for which data is available is 1414. Data are missing for 1413, but the following excerpt from a 17 October 1413 letter fromby Filippo Dall'Antella to Pippo di Franco Sacchetti suggests similar pressures were in play (Conventi Soppressi 78, 324:108). Like Acciaiuoli's letter, this one is redolent with Morelli-esque sensibilities: “My honorable elder and dearest father, I wrote another letter to you in the past few days, a letter which I do not know if you received. Now [again] I recommend to you my affairs concerning the prestanzone, that I not be treated as I was with the prestanze; you know how much I was treated unjustly. And I hope to be to you, Pippo di Franco, everything that you would like.”¹⁷

Note here the combination of familiarity, or aspirations to familiarity, in the body of the letter, with rather deferential framing at the beginning and the end. The tactics of rhetorical deference and rhetorical brinkmanship (“you know how much I was treated unjustly”), so notably mixed in the practices espoused by Morelli, are combined here. The letter melds the two cognitive components of clientage—deference and reciprocal obligation—into a single interaction. Also present here is something quite common throughout Florentine correspondence—the metaphorical equation of the patron with a father, with the attendant implication that patrons are expected to carry out the same duties of protection and guidance in public life that a good father ought to provide. Nevertheless, this letter's rhetoric is not particularly florid.

Moving ahead a decade, the next example provides evidence that patronage networks had become activated to deal with the tax burden. Pagnozzo di Bartolomeo Ridolfi, member of a distinguished patrilineage and head of a moderately wealthy household (Catasto 66:97), wrote to Averardo de' Medici on 18 February 1424(25) (Mediceo avanti il Principato I, 64), not about his own tax problem, but that of an underling¹⁸

This letter lacks the somewhat indignant tone of our previous examples, undoubtedly because Ridolfi is writing primarily concerning someone else's peril rather than his own. What is noteworthy is that Ridolfi portrays himself as close to Averardo and somewhat distant from Benucci. Benucci is “this little guy” who is poor (“in miseria”); by contrast, he addresses Averardo using the familiar “tu” and makes a point of his personal acquaintance with Averardo's son and daughter-in-law.¹⁹

The Medici were not the only targets of requests for tax help in the 1420s, as the following letter of 26 June 1427, from Marco di Simone Strozzi to Giorgio Cristofani, attests (Carte Strozziane, III'e serie, 132:277). Note how social distances are constructed rather differently here than in the Ridolfi letter. For one thing, Strozzi makes explicit that he is writing at the behest of his friend Ferrantini, not some “little guy.” “Dearest elder brother, My friend Mariotto Ferrantini has heard that I have trust in you. I myself am certain of this and so in service to him I am writing to you, praying that it be pleasing to you to look favorably on him, to collect certain monies he is owed by debtors of his employed at your court. For he cannot take care of his needs, nor contrive to remit his prestanzoni, which, if not paid, will prohibit him from leaving the country. When you write to me about anything, write to me concerning this. Nothing more. I am always at your disposal . . . ”²⁰

Strozzi deliberately addresses Cristofani lovingly and deferentially as a dear older brother, using formal terms of address throughout. He begins the letter by putting the responsibility on Ferrantini for initiating the request and claims that he himself is motivated by his desire to do what friends do for each other. Only secondarily does he assert his certainty that Cristofani will be willing to help. “I am always at your disposal” is a typical stock letter-ending, and “praying that it be pleasing to you to look favorably on him” is a typical deferential framing of requests for help in fifteenth-century patronage correspondence. Still, these are not counterbalanced in this letter with forceful claims of deserving assistance.

There can be little doubt that the early 1430s were the period when Florentine taxes were most onerous. Accordingly, the rhetoric deployed in requests for assistance became more florid and urgent. In a letter written on November 14, 1430, by Federigo Sassetti to Niccolo di Iacopo di Ubertino Strozzi (Carte Strozziane, III'e serie, 113:94), Federigo explains how Lionardo and Bartolomeo di Ser Tino had formerly paid his expenses “out of kindness” (per loro benignità), but now they would not pay them any more. Consequently, he wrote, “I have no other recourse but to you, and for this reason I pray that you do your best in any way that occurs to you, that on the 8th of December, which is the day the rent for my place is due, that you make to pay the money there at Florence where Lionardo Gondi indicates, and this I pray of you as much as I know how, such that if the need [I have] and the adversity [I face] were not so great, I would not beg this of you.”²¹

Now we are getting to the core patronage-style language that appears across the board around the time of the catasto. “I have no other recourse but to you:” the recipient is portrayed as the only possible helper available. “I pray that you do your best in any way that occurs to you,” and “I pray of you as much as I know how”: the repetition of the verb pregare—admittedly a common word, but one which a character in Leon Battista Alberti's I libri della famiglia claims all self-respecting Florentines should shun (Alberti 1969:68)—had become a stock element of requests for help. Likewise, the word “to beg” (gravare), another highly deferential cue, becomes increasingly common in patronage correspondence (McLean 1996). Finally, “need” and “adversity” are identified as motivating this request, rather than the fairness or justice cited in Acciaiuoli's letter. Thus Sassetti writes from a relatively supine position, one emerging directly from the extent of his need and the extremity of fiscal pressures, but also considerably determined by the changing culture of requests for favor in the 1420s.

More of this change is evident in the following letter of 23 May 1431, written from the prison in Pisa by Giovanni di Pagolo Cantucci to Matteo di Simone Strozzi (Carte Strozziane, III'e serie, 112:65). Cantucci requests that Strozzi act in such a way that they be saved from undeserved injury and shame (“il danno e lla vergogna”), and that they be served with a grazia or licenzia to set their financial affairs straight.²²

As in earlier letters we have examined, Cantucci proposes multiple justifications for demanding assistance—here both love between writer and recipient, and the reasonableness of the request. But there is, in addition, a direct expression—even a promise—of obligation and future payback attendant upon receipt of assistance. Unlike the first letters we examined, this writer explicitly invites the recipient to activate a network of friends (amici) on his behalf. In the first mention of the word, Cantucci refers to “the friends” (gli amici), suggesting a more or less impartial group of potential helpers. But in the second instance he asks to be recommended to “our friends” (agli amici nostri), suggestive of a more bounded, exclusive, and potentially partisan grouping of loyalists. Friendship (amicizia) was an ambiguous term (Trexler 1980; Weissman 1982), carrying the sense of both sentimental attachment and political partisanship. Here, too, with the references to Luigi Guicciardini, we find explicit reference to a pattern that had by this time become widespread—that of enlisting others to pay taxes on one's behalf.

No doubt it was prudent for those making requests to develop as many potential friendly contacts as possible, hoping that one of them might come through, or even that the more patrons back home in Florence who were apprised of one's situation, the greater the likelihood that one's need would be discussed in their conversations. In this way, too, those making requests sought to frame their problems in terms of matters of collective importance. Surviving letters of the Strozzi make clear how much that family cooperated to ensure that taxes were paid on time.²⁴

Tax difficulties were beginning to affect ever-higher echelons of society. The Tornabuoni family, in-laws of the Medici and among the very richest households in the city in 1427, experienced a 45.4 percent drop in their net fortune between 1427 and 1431 (Conti 1984:88). No wonder, then, that Francesco Tornabuoni wrote to Averardo de' Medici (his niece's father-in-law), from Cascina on 19 June 1432, using the same kind of urgent language that Federigo Sassetti had used with Niccolò Strozzi, asking Averardo to help him with a pressing financial problem: “Respected and honored brother, Yesterday I received a letter of yours of the 16th of this month, to which I respond now, praying that it be pleasing to you to contrive by all means available that I obtain permission (licenzia) to return to Florence because the necessity of tending to my affairs presses me to be there. I am still mindful of what you write concerning the Monte money. For this too it is necessary for me to be there . . . Nothing else for now, except that I pray and beg of you as much as I am able that you contrive that I may come back there . . . ” (Mediceo avanti il Principato V, 229). This letter was followed by another six days later:

Yet another letter was written three days later, virtually identical in character (Mediceo avanti il Principato V, 234). In all of these Tornabuoni seeks a licenzia—a document signifying official permission of the commune to return to Florence in order to tend to one's financial affairs and cover one's debts to the city. Although he does not indicate that he was acting in any official capacity on behalf of the commune at the time, Tornabuoni's letters from this period do suggest that he was aware of and even involved in Florentine troop movements and needs. Thus, at least in an implicit way, his correspondence sits astride the goals of service to the commune on the one hand, and evasion of state coercion on the other.

Tornabuoni begins each letter with a standard opening salutation that emphasizes Averardo's obligation to him through the trope of parentado. All three letters employ the “ti priego” formula, and in fact repeat it a second time to achieve a more plaintive quality. The expression, “I pray as much as I am able and know” (priego quanto posso e so), is a very common turn of phrase in patronage correspondence throughout the fifteenth century, yet the superlative quality of this figure of speech was undoubtedly intended to heighten the impression made on Averardo.

In a letter of 5 November 1431, another Medici partisan, Bartolomeo Orlandini, wrote to Averardo seeking assistance on a financial matter pertaining indirectly to the crushing level of taxation in effect in the city. This letter demonstrates another facet of the link between taxes and political partisanship: some writers asked bankers to purchase government bills or borrow state revenues on their behalf for the purpose of meeting impending private financial obligations.

Orlandini's large household had listed significant debits in its 1427 catasto declaration, but their gross assets placed them among the top four hundred of the city's 9,780 households (Catasto 79:151). Clearly, the tax burdens imposed by the state drastically reduced liquidity in the city and caused citizens to fear for their own standing, forcing them to resort to ever more complicated strategies and manipulations of the tax system. As with earlier examples, this request is first framed in terms of family (“Magnificent and honored like a father”), although here we see a far more deferential rhetoric than Dall'Antella or Tornabuoni used. Orlandini acknowledges the great shame (vergogna, the opposite of honor, onore) that he faces;²⁵

As Figure 1 indicates, after 1432 the burden of forced loans tapered off dramatically, and yet the high taxes left an indelible mark that became more evident with successive small increases in tax exactions from the late 1430s into 1440. This comes through in a letter of 4 February 1439(40) from Lionardo di Antonio de' Nobili to Cosimo de' Medici:

Nobili continues, explaining that his family has often had to resort to living off of the woods. But soon he comes to his main point: “I hear that it has been arranged that a new imborsatione [i.e., a collection of names eligible for office] concerning the offices of the palace, both domestic and abroad, is to take place. I am certain that you and your sons need expend little effort (bisogna durare pocha fatica) by honest means, and so I want to pray of you, with your friends, that you contrive that your godson not be consigned to oblivion (dimenticatoio).”

Despite the decline in tax pressures, many citizens still suffered on account of them. Sometimes they bore this suffering for a period after taxes were levied, but eventually the strain caught up with them. Consequently the techniques for overcoming tax problems in pursuit of communal office remained in place, arguably with a heightened rhetoric of deference towards those whose influence had grown enormously. More intriguing still, Nobili openly suggests in his letter that he believes he owes his survival to the dismantling of the catasto and its replacement with more traditional methods of collection, beginning in the early 1400s. These methods—the novina, the ventina, the settima—enhanced the exercise of favoritism. Nobili may have believed that the Medici themselves were instrumental in this change. Now he reminds Cosimo (who appears to have had no direct role in the distribution and collection of the new tax) of his terrible situation, hoping once again to get relief and, more than that, re-enlistment, for his son if not himself, in the register of potential office-holders. To accomplish this he flatters, writing that he is certain that it will require “little effort” on Cosimo's part to pull this off. By now we have come quite a distance from Donato Acciaiuoli's petition to Riccardo del Bene, who at least had been one of those actually charged with distributing the tax burden.

A letter written on 30 November 1441 to Cosimo's son, Piero, by Giacomino Tebalducci, introduces one further level of remove into the chain of tax-related favor-seeking. It is not the letter's recipient who is to provide assistance, but the recipient's father:

Again we see that the catasto's effects persisted a decade or more after its inception. And again, a writer provides multiple justifications for receiving assistance: his past burdens have been unjust, he has a great need, he desires that the Medici enjoy profit and honor (two desiderata routinely paired rhetorically throughout the fifteenth century). Furthermore, the assertion, “In this present life all of my hope is in you alone” recalls Federigo Sassetti's claim that “I have no other recourse but to you.” Nevertheless, we detect here yet another increment in the hyperbole of patronage-seeking communication that exceeds what we have seen: in none of our earlier letters is the “power” (potere) of the patron so explicitly recognized.

In the late 1440s, tax exactions surged again, particularly in 1446 and 1448. A variety of letters in the correspondence of Bartolomeo Cederni (see F. Kent 1991) deal with this new yet familiar climate, including a letter from Cederni's friend,²⁶

This letter, rather than being purely a plea for help, functions more like a venting of frustration to a friend or associate, driven less by fear than by annoyance. Thus later in the letter Bernardo writes, in reference to the possibility of becoming allo specchio, “use your ingenuity and contrive that I not have to deal with this nuisance” (noia). Further, Bernardo asks da Ghiaccetto to confer with the powerful patron Neri di Gino Capponi to initiate the process of having his tax share reduced, and yet he also writes toward the end of the letter, “I am not writing to Neri [directly] so as not to give him any annoyance” (tedio).

Herlihy (1991:Fig. 8) has documented a considerable increase in the number of citizens disqualified on account of tax arrears in the late 1440s. And the chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti claimed that the jails were full of people who had not paid their taxes around 1446 (Conti 1984:209). And yet, could it be that the threat of being allo specchio was becoming, at least for some citizens, an empty one, a routine “nuisance” rather than a catastrophe? It seems likely that this was no longer deferential patronage correspondence but simply the way friends expressed the problem to each other in their informal interactions.

Remarkably, it is hard to find letters concerning tax relief from the early 1450s, when the burden once again reached epidemic proportions. Therefore, I will skip ahead to 1479 for my final example, this time a letter from an eponymous descendant of Giovanni Morelli, the early fifteenth-century diarist whose advice to his children included explicit directions for hiding wealth and lamented unjust and excessive tax burdens. This later Giovanni Morelli wrote to Lorenzo the Magnificent on 15 April 1479, during another year of heightened taxation. Once again, tax matters and eligibility for office are completely interwoven, very much as they were in Lionardo di Antonio de' Nobili's letter of 1439. He even uses the same imagery of oblivion as Nobili did to describe his plight:

Here we find similarities with earlier letters, but also noteworthy differences. Whereas Nobili referred to Cosimo, only five years his junior, as a brother and addressed him familiarly, Morelli here uses formal language with Lorenzo, even though they are the same age. More importantly, whereas Nobili indulged in the traditional griping about taxation and cajolery to enlist the support of a patron, this is mostly absent from Morelli's letter. Furthermore, Morelli uses especially powerful language to convey the extent of his indebtedness to Lorenzo, a not uncommon rhetorical style in late fifteenth-century Florence. This language is part and parcel of the project by which persons subject to state fiscal predations sought relief by means of interpersonal favor-seeking, placing front-and-center their desire to serve the commune as participating citizens.

Towards a Synthetic Reading of the Evidence: Society and State in Florence

A handful of documents do not a conclusive argument make. Nevertheless, they do reveal a pattern of behavior and of discourse whereby Florentines turned to their powerful fellow citizens for assistance whenever they were heavily burdened with taxes. This game of deference and demands, in which Florentines made explicit or implicit offers of return favors or personal loyalty to would-be padroni, was already in place before 1400, but became especially urgent in the 1420s and 1430s, precisely around the time of the introduction of the catasto, widely recognized as the fifteenth century's most innovative and forward-looking piece of tax-related legislation. Rather than evaporating, the culture of patronage remained, and the legacy of the catasto lived on in later tax-related correspondence. Florentines regularly commented on and devised tactics for coping with the various demands of the state in their private letters. Furthermore, certain phrases and tropes appear with some regularity in these letters. They seem similar enough for us to say that the Florentine practice of favor-seeking in the face of demands made by the state was in some sense institutionalized—that is, it involved a set of widely used procedures that continually reproduced a set of shared expectations about the world of Florentine politics.

Undoubtedly there were changes in the texture of this institution over time. For one, citizens switched from proactive strategies for avoiding high tax assessments to reactive strategies for paying off crushing tax burdens. Ironically, the catasto was meant to eliminate favoritism in the distribution of the tax burden, but it could not eliminate favoritism in the repayment of individual assessments. In examining letters over time, we can see a shift in the direction of more expressions of deference toward recipients and relatively fewer expressions of desert, at least when letters were addressed to one of the Medici. Finally, decisions regarding the distribution of taxes increasingly were made informally by persons other than those officially assigned by lot to handle the task. Virtually whenever the tax burden increased and/or methods for assigning shares of that burden were altered, individual Florentines responded with critical commentary on state policy and sycophantic letters to private citizens who could help them.

Consistently across many decades, though, the challenges the state faced with respect to tax collection, and the difficulties citizens faced with respect to tax payments, were intimately tied to office-holding, both at the level of official communal policy and within the confines of personal correspondence. As I have noted, Florentines' relationship to the state was both adversarial and participatory, and this duality had significant consequences for macro-political developments. And here we return to the question of why the modern state stalled in Italy, a question that comparative historical sociology has so far failed to answer satisfactorily.

The problem is not exactly the old one that has long handicapped classic state modernization theory (Moore 1966; Anderson 1974; Tilly et al. 1975; Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Levi 1988). That theory's models were based rather simplistically on war-making, class conflict, or the interests of state actors, and they have been supplanted with models that stress, for example, political institutional conditions as critical factors in state-building trajectories (Downing 1991; Ertman 1997). Particularly with respect to Italian state development, recent sociological scholarship has stressed coalitions among key groups and a balance of the essential resources they controlled as critical determinants of state outcomes. Thus Tilly (1992) argues that a balance between coercive capacity and capital accumulation was important for state-making. The Italians, he argues, concentrated on the latter to the relative exclusion of the former, resulting in imperfectly implemented, centralized states that were ultimately unwilling to prosecute wars (1992:65, 77–78). However, Tilly's model falls somewhat short of the mark: most of the Italian city-states did wage wars, both on behalf of commercial enterprise and in pursuit of military security, with substantial resources at their disposal, for considerable lengths of time, at significant levels of financial sacrifice. More importantly, rather than shirking their responsibilities, a relatively small number of Florentine citizens who were simultaneously merchants and politicians (as well as fathers, ambassadors, neighbors, and so on; see Padgett and McLean 2002) repeatedly carried a disproportionately large share of the office-holding and fiscal burden of the city. Political savvy was not lacking, but it was attached to the role of cives (citizen) rather than to a distinct group in society.

Hendrik Spruyt (1994) has argued, effectively contra Tilly, that we should not be satisfied with viewing the sovereign state as a “just-right” balance of requisite inputs. Why did the city-state form perish, while the territorial sovereign state flourished? Spruyt's principal explanation is that the early and ongoing presence of nobles within the Italian city-states resulted in an unstable state pact between commercial patricians and the martial nobility. The city-states faced a recurrent threat of factionalism generated by antagonism between its leading classes (1994:130, 137ff.), and so the legitimacy of the communal government's claim to speak on behalf of all citizens was continually challenged (1994:149). By contrast, sovereign leaders were more effective in curtailing free riding within the polity, more capable of making credible commitments, and more likely to recognize each other than to recognize actors adopting alternative forms of governance (1994:155, 176), thus reinforcing their numerical dominance in the European political system. However, Spruyt affords scant analytical attention to how the various groups in city-states actually interacted. Nor does he consider that members of the Florentine ruling class had a greater diversity of interests and identities than a simple rendering of the map of class interests would lead us to believe.

One of the most insightful comparative-historical treatments of the Italian city-states to date in sociology appears in Richard Lachmann's Capitalists in Spite of Themselves (2000). Lachmann attends to the outcomes of actual conflicts, rather than simply specifying a static model of the logical consequences of finding a particular array of elite groups in the same space. Throughout Europe, “elite conflict propelled forward each era of transformation” in the development of the early modern state and the concomitant development of, in Weber's words, “economically oriented capitalism” (2000:9, 45). “Opportunities for agency” from below are a function of the structure of elite relations (2000:11). Thus, factional divisions among Florentine magnates in the late 1200s provided urban patricians (the popolani) with the opportunity to take control of the state (2000:57). In 1343, a split within the popolani, combined with economic crises, enabled an alliance of magnates and lower guildsmen to challenge the regime. Conversely, a challenge from below in the Ciompi rebellion of 1378–1382 resulted in a reconsolidated alliance of popolani with minor guildsmen to exclude the working class sottoposti from political participation (2000:77; Padgett and Ansell 1993). This alliance produced dramatic growth in patron-client attachments among elites, and to rank-and-file Florentines, thereby defusing a good deal of the city's class politics (Najemy 1982; Kent 1978). However, Lachmann argues, it also limited elites' ability to forge innovative political and diplomatic policy. In a recent extension of this argument, Tarrow (2004) asserts that patronage-based factionalism produced a landscape of contentious politics and political instability that severely inhibited the Florentine state from building a strong military that was the hallmark of early modern European state formation. From 1434 on, the Medici successfully deflected challenges to their supremacy through quasi-monopoly control of communal offices and access to capital, and yet Medici measures to control the political and fiscal process often barely achieved sufficient popular support (Rubinstein 1997). Clientelistic politics hampered the development of an autonomous state (and a more revolutionary economy).²⁷

Still, Lachmann overstates the clarity of distinctions between groups, and understates certain groups' commitments to the regime as a whole and its perpetuation. Not all political choices were as self-interested as he suggests. He underestimates the enormous involvement of the “oligarchic” families in the commercial economy, overstates the distinction between popolani and new men, and implicitly disregards the fact that some of the richest Florentine citizens were at least mild supporters of state administrative innovations that might have jeopardized their immediate interests.

How, then, did interpersonal politicking constrain state action and shape the spirit and understanding of governance? Problems with the emergence of a strong Florentine state brewed up from a shifting array of interactions among individuals constituted not by simple group identities, but by multiple affiliations and roles, any number of which could be activated to achieve personal objectives. Among these identities were the roles of father and neighbor, for example, that suggested private interests at some odds with the state, and that of office-holder, which suggested some congruence between individual and state interests. Only by studying interactions can we see how and when these identities were invoked, and with what consequences for the development of the state. This is because state institutions and rules of thumb for interpersonal interaction developed side by side.

To conclude, administrative change in Florence was accomplished within the constraints of a contest, not between state actors and civil society, but between citizens in their role as custodians of the state, and the same citizens in their role as subjects to the state. Certainly the modest separation of the state from the citizenry allowed the onerous tax burden to be accepted as legitimate to a remarkable degree, recurrent grumblings of the populace aside. The implication of the Tilly, Spruyt, and Lachmann story-line, that Florentine elites were simply unwilling to burden themselves with a more costly and powerful state, does not hold up. And yet the embeddedness of the state in its private citizenry obviously affected the extent to which it could develop in an autonomous manner. Administrative developments in the fiscal state—in fact, a succession of alternately modern and traditional strategies for accumulating resources necessary for the protection and growth of the territorial state—constantly and repeatedly created and reinforced personalistic, honor-driven relations. These relations ultimately jeopardized the state's strength and autonomy in a way very different from that suggested by a shorthand class analysis. However much Florentine statemakers desired reform, they found it impossible or inconceivable to establish a fiscal regime that would decouple taxation from political participation. In fact, expansion of the privilege of political participation was repeatedly used, especially by the Medici, to quell potential unrest (D. Kent 1987; Najemy 1982; 1991). Accordingly, Florentine leaders countenanced and even encouraged widespread personalistic patronage. Just as incipient state-building in the form of the catasto was a largely unintended consequence of Florentine collective fiscal decision-making under crisis, so too the strengthening of informal, politically active networks that undercut state autonomy was an unintended consequence of the state-building process itself. And this was so, to a significant extent, because of the constraints imposed by the institutional demands of republican government.

Archival Sources

All in Archivio di Stato di Firenze [A.S.F.]:

Carte del Bene, 49

Carte Strozziane, III'e serie

Catasto

Conventi Soppressi, 78

Mediceo avanti il Principato