Darkness and Enlightenment in the Age of Giannone

This period in Neapolitan and Italian history has been called the Age of Giannone;Reference Ajello² it has also been known as the Age of Giambattista VicoReference Pietropaolo³ – a countryman of Giannone: both were born in the same kingdom, if not in the same city, and they were alumni of the same University, now called the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Even if the two men are not known to have been friends (Giannone never liked Vico, although he probably mistook the latter's humility for snobbery and disrespect), they shared a belief in the power of historical method to reveal the true bases of human institutions – however uncomfortable these truths might be for those institutions.

Vico theorized that in spite of the great advances of the scientific revolution, humans would always remain creatures of nature and not vice versa – and therefore unable to gain a detached perspective on a natural reality lying beyond their grasp. History, however, was something made by us and only by us, and the same went for the human institutions about which historians inquired. Therefore, these institutions could be far more fully known than matter, bodies and the cosmos.Reference Vico⁴ Giannone would have more or less agreed with this position. He certainly devoted much of his life to investigating the past and bringing historical methodology and presentation to new levels.

Although Giannone and Vico are often consigned to the so-called ‘Pre-Enlightenment’, Giannone nonetheless really belongs to the same trend as Voltaire – another example of the danger of historical writing – and Giannone's historical work is typical of the ‘philosophical’ historiography that we associate with Voltaire. Indeed, there are many passages in his work that make us think about Voltaire's later Essai sur les moeurs (1756).Reference Grell⁵ The hallmark of Voltaire's work and that of all the ‘philosophical’ historians of the Enlightenment – including Edward Gibbon, the great writer of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – was a broader outlook on the significance of history, a profound concern with the improvement of humans and human institutions, combined with very great attention to the documentary and empirical foundations of historical research that had been built from the Renaissance to the time of the great antiquaries and erudites of the seventeenth century, from Casaubon to the fathers of St. Maur to Benedetto Bacchini, to Ludovico Antonio Muratori.Reference Momigliano⁶ Another feature that Giannone shared with both Voltaire and Gibbon was a deep dissatisfaction with Christianity as it had developed through the ages. When Voltaire signed his letters with the slogan ‘Écrasez l'infame,’ he was calling on people to do what they could to help remove the power of the Church from civil affairs and people's consciences.⁷ Giannone would have fully agreed.

Giannone's masterpiece was known in English as The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, and it was first published in 1723.Reference Ricuperati⁸ In it he analyses the history of Naples from the origins to his own time. What Giannone attempted to do was to inform his readers that the laws and customs of that kingdom, so jealously protected and shored up by those who benefited most from them, and defended from any change, were not changeless at all. Indeed, they had gone through profound modifications with each successive wave of conquest, from the Romans to the Lombards to the Normans to the Swabians. All of these dominations had left their mark, just as the princes themselves had come and gone, each one claiming to be more legitimate than the last, and bringing with them their various magistracies, officials and tribunals. By implication, then, if institutions had changed and developed over time, they would change again – indeed, they must change again, to produce a more just, a more egalitarian and a freer society. To convey these ideas, Giannone established what he believed was the only genre capable of capturing the essence of these institutions: namely, a civil history, unlike any that had come before. ‘The history I am about to write,’ he promised, ‘will not deafen readers with the din of battles and with the noise of the arms which for so many centuries have made [Naples] a miserable theater of war.’Reference Vico⁹

Giannone's view thus appears to be an excellent example confirming Constantin Fasolt's conclusion in his recent book, The Limits of History. In that book, Fasolt agrees that history is indeed ‘a dangerous form of knowledge’, precisely because it deals with change – and historians are responsible for telling their fellow-citizens that we must distance ourselves from the past or else human life would remain stationary.Reference Fasolt¹⁰ For the key philosophical and practical presuppositions of this view, I refer the reader to Fasolt's interesting discussion. What concerns us here is the combination of convictions about the past and convictions about the present that seem to characterize Giannone's activity as a scholar, and which we seem to agree belong perennially to the historian's task. Giannone of course would have added the proposition that, if there is no change, there is no progress. We will come back to that proposition shortly.

Giannone's innovation and his courage were particularly evident in his practice of including a special chapter concerning Church politics at the end of each book of his history. No wonder that the work was particularly admired by Edward Gibbon, who mines it thoroughly in his own Decline and Fall. Gibbon's conviction, after all, was that the fall of Rome was mainly due to Christianity. And in his personal diary, in an entry dated 11 December 1763, dedicated to Giannone's Civil History, he remarks, ‘the candor, penetration and freedom of this excellent lawyer [i.e. Giannone], will ever ensure to this work the esteem of all wise men. Churchmen are not always of that number.’Reference Gibbon¹¹ To provide an illustration of philosophical history, especially the version conceived of it by Giannone, which excited so much controversy among Church and government officials, let us examine some of the more famous passages.

To take an example among many, consider what he has to say about the eighth century AD, the age of the Lombard kings of Italy. And in Giannone's account it is a story of idiocy and ignorance of the people and deception by the clergy. To wit:

By telling the story of the eighth century, Giannone hoped to draw attention to the Church as an institution, which in his view had done damage in every age, in correspondingly different ways.

We now turn to a passage from his discussion of the kingdom of Naples toward the end of the Spanish domination, in the time of Charles II, in the late seventeenth century, a time Giannone had experienced as a young man. In comparison with the eighth century, there has surely been change in ecclesiastical affairs, but not necessarily improvement.

The only ecclesiastic for whom Giannone has any praise during the period in question is, oddly enough, Pope Innocent XIII, mainly because of this pope's sensitivity (in Giannone's view) to the proper boundaries of church and state. To wit:

Overall, Giannone's assessment of his own time period was harsh. But present miseries were the result of a long development. After the Italian wars of the early sixteenth century, southern Italy fell under the domination of the Spanish monarchy. Finally in 1713, in the context of the Spanish Succession War, the Spanish were replaced by the Austrian Habsburgs. Here is Giannone's summary of the legacy of two hundred years of Spanish government: poverty and inertia from being taxed to death, an outdated feudal system, a culture of more deference to the powerful than to the intelligent, and lack of interest in commerce, industry, or any of the other aspects that made a people happy and prosperous. ‘The viceroy who knew how to get more money,’ commented Giannone, ‘was the most-esteemed.’Reference Vico¹⁵ And again, ‘With so many famous ports,’ he marvelled that ‘they did not try to fill them up with ships, fairs and free entry zones, like other states located on the sea, after the manner in which the English, Dutch, and Portuguese, among others, have distinguished themselves.’Reference Vico¹⁶

He drew attention to the few moments of good government that were worth recalling, such as the administration of Viceroy Pedro de Toledo. ‘This wise minister knew,’ said Giannone, ‘that the principal source of the people's contentment is the equal distribution of justice among them all.’Reference Vico¹⁷ Perhaps the most defective institutions could not be completely replaced without intolerable side effects. So in his account of the recent viceroy Gaspare de Haro, he advised the new Austrian regime not to throw the Spanish laws out entirely: ‘He saw that the wisest legislators after the Romans were the Spanish.’ De Haro's difficulties lay not in the laws but in ‘too much facility in dispensing them, and the great indulgence used in executing the prescribed punishments’ which ‘had corrupted discipline and put the state in disorder.’Reference Vico¹⁸ Reform, Giannone believed, was needed, based on avoiding the mistakes of the past and following the leadership of the best governments of the present.

Perhaps the attribution of the worst misgovernment to the Spanish and not to the Austrians, who at least had not yet had enough time to do too much harm, deflected any possible official criticism away from them, and from Giannone himself. Also appreciated, no doubt, from the Austrian government's standpoint, was Giannone's insistence on separating Church from state and making sure Church did not encroach too much on state prerogatives – cases of this kind were, after all, just then filling all the courts.Reference Galasso¹⁹

The possible approval of his work by the state lawyers was perhaps one of the reasons for Giannone's strategy regarding publication in an age of censorship. In Naples in those times, a licence was required from both the ecclesiastical and the civil authorities. As Giannone recalls the matter in his autobiography, considering the controversial nature of what he had to say in the work, he thought long and hard about how to proceed, and he concluded that since his research supported civil authority against the encroachments of religious authority and not vice versa, it ought to be easy to get at least civil – i.e. state – censors to approve. As for the licence from the religious authorities, he considered that it was useless to ask from them something that they could not deliver; so he simply did not bother.Reference Giannone²⁰ In fact, the civil censors were very happy about the printing, perhaps also because they and the rest of the viceroyal government got free copies.

The reaction to his work surprised even Giannone, as he noted, again in his autobiography. Local readers mostly paid no attention to the civil portion of the history – the new discoveries about Naples's past – and focused almost exclusively on the ecclesiastical material. In particular, Giannone's enemies and those who envied his success and his learning were quick to concoct a version of the work that was as inaccurate as it was inflammatory, and to use this version as propaganda among persons not likely to read the original book. These unfriendly critics made the most outrageous claims; for instance, that Giannone denied the ordaining power of bishops, the existence of miracles, the existence of Purgatory, the intercession of the saints, the benefits of pilgrimages and visits to sanctuaries, and so forth, saying that he even advocated fornication as being perfectly licit.Reference Giannone²¹

What was even more insidious, Giannone's enemies directed their attacks specifically to incite the opposition of particular religious orders, saying that he denied the efficacy of the special devotions most dear to them: the rosary of the Dominicans, the three-knotted cord of the Franciscans, the strap of the Augustinians, and the scapula of the Carmelites. The religious people who heard about this dangerous insolence of Giannone had no need to go to the text to discover whether he had actually said these things (he had not) – it was enough for them that he was a dangerous meddler and as a preventive measure should be humbled and deactivated.

Giannone's narrative, in the autobiography, was even harsher, concerning what was going on, he said: ‘the friars and the monks, fearing that because of such ideas, their incomes from such devotions might be reduced .. began to declaim in their churches and in their confessionals, and to preach that I was a rotten heretic.’Reference Giannone²² For a time, he said, he was the hot topic of the city, and in the streets and squares people spoke of nothing – and no-one – else. To be sure, by some he was also regarded as a real hero. One such admirer stopped him outside the tribunal and once again, without having read the book, thanked him for proving that fornication was permissible. Giannone replied that in his work he had simply analysed the custom of concubinage among the ancient Romans, which was similar to a kind of marriage and had nothing to do with the fornication condemned by St. Paul.

Depicted by the ecclesiastical establishment as a devil in human clothing, Giannone became a negative superstar, such that people on the street would point at him, and would crowd into the galleries of the tribunal where he worked, just to get a glimpse of the Antichrist. The talk rose to a crescendo, and to avoid the worst consequences, so said Giannone, the viceroy was forced to order a moratorium on all discussion about the topic. Sale of the book was suspended, the immediate result of which, Giannone reported, with some satisfaction, was more success: ‘the prohibition increased the curiosity about the book as well as its price, as it was all the more avidly sought and read.’Reference Giannone²³ And only after a significant number of readers had read what Giannone had actually written did the calumnies against him begin to die down. But the matter did not end there.

When officials in Rome got wind of what was going on in Naples, they reproved the papal nuncio there for negligence in not having paid attention to the publication of such a scandalous book in the first place, and for not having stopped it and its distribution on the first day, thus avoiding the whole subsequent affair. The nuncio, to save face with the Roman officials, and also to make up for lost time, thereupon pressured the viceroy to do something more drastic – to which the latter responded that he had already done his duty. Instead, the Neapolitan ecclesiastical officials picked on the hapless printer of the work, and on the grounds that he had not asked their permission to print, but only the viceroy's, had him excommunicated.

But Giannone was still not off the hook. In fact, his critical moment came when a rumour was circulated among the ignorant crowds of Naples, by his usual adversaries, to the effect that he had committed the most unpardonable of all sins in the eyes of most Neapolitans: namely, he had denied the miracle of San Gennaro. It was an accusation guaranteed to make him not only a pariah – he was already that – but a man marked for public humiliation, public violence, and much worse. Few things, as we all know, are more sacred in Naples than the miracle of San Gennaro, a bishop of Naples killed in Diocletian's purges of Christians in the fourth century AD. His blood is conserved in a kind of crystallized form in certain small vials in a reliquary in the Naples cathedral, where three times a year – on 19 September, the feast of San Gennaro, on 16 December, and on the Saturday before the first Sunday in March – it miraculously liquefies, having the consistency, one supposes, of the original blood of the saint. The ceremony has been carried out for centuries, and years in which the blood remains solid on these occasions are regarded with great apprehension. But the worst year of all would be that in which some proof would show that the substance is not blood or did not come from San Gennaro, or some other terrible revelation. Such a claim was attributed, in the time of which we are speaking, by Giannone's enemies to Giannone.

In vain, Giannone insisted, to whoever would listen, that the offending passage in his work was being grossly misinterpreted. The passage occurred where he recounted the siege of Naples by Odet de Foix, viscount de Lautrec, in 1527.Reference Giannone²⁴ As it happened, that year the blood in the vials did not liquefy, so Neapolitans expected the worst. But suddenly Lautrec's army was hit by a pestilence, he gave up and went home, and the predictions on the basis of the miracle of San Gennaro were proven false. To interpret this passage out of context as a denial of the miracle, Giannone insisted, was a ridiculous lie – but Neapolitans were so much more inclined to believe his detractors than to believe him, that the few friends he had left counselled him to forget Naples and save his skin by leaving the country at once and heading for Vienna, the administrative centre of the Habsburg government of Naples, where he would be out of the reach of the most fanatical of his critics and perhaps might be more appreciated. There he could begin a new life.

He left just in time, because as soon as he turned his back on Naples, the archbishop's curia in Naples, having already excommunicated the printer of the Civil History, now finally decided to excommunicate the author himself – i.e. Giannone – which would have made his life not only difficult there, but impossible. And thus began a long exile which, with many twists and turns, only really ended with his death in a jail in Piedmont in 1748 at age 72.

While in Vienna, Giannone began yet another work, the Triregno or Three Kingdoms, which discussed the earthly kingdom, the celestial kingdom and the papal kingdom, using some of the same historical principles he had elaborated in the Civil History.Reference Israel²⁵ He tried to show how Christianity, from its simple origins in Antiquity as a religious faith and system of ethics, could have developed into such a huge and overbearing secular institution with sacred purposes combined with the profane, now aggressively defended by key families who stood to gain much from the existing structure. Once again, news about the work long preceded any actual reading by Giannone's detractors.

In fact, before his arrest in the kingdom of Savoy, Giannone shipped the manuscript to a printer in Geneva, but this man, rather than having the work printed, promptly forwarded it to the Roman Inquisition.Reference Giannone²⁶ There was apparently at least another copy, which, reproduced by hand, enjoyed a scandalous career as an underground classic throughout the eighteenth century before being finally printed in 1898, nearly 150 years after the death of the author – but that is another story. As is often the case of great intellectuals who have been separated from the instruments of their greatness, i.e. their research tools, their data, the comfort of their studios, and the context of like-minded individuals, we can only imagine what might have been the productivity of Giannone, had he been left to live his life in peace.

Although Giannone was clearly aware of the limits of history, he never allowed these limits to get in the way of the serious task to which he had set himself. The need to understand the monuments of the past in order to set the present on a new footing was far too great. Nowadays, we perceive more than ever the fragility of memory and the challenges posed to the historical method by problems of interpretation, an incomplete documentary record, our own difficulty in separating our science from our social and political agendas. We also understand Giannone as the product of a particular point in time, in which some people shared interest in the Enlightenment program of promoting a set of ideals of liberty, freedom and progress – ideals that we tend to surround with a wide array of limiting conditions, if we truly believe in them at all. However, we can surely agree that a better understanding of the past is an inevitable component of the intellectual toolbag that we need to carry with us on the voyage from the present to the future – even if that understanding collides with what we like to think about ourselves, as a society, as a state, as individuals. This is what makes us children not only of the Enlightenment but of the tradition of humanist thinking that gave us history in the first place.