The Ugly Renaissance (48 page)

The better to illustrate this, each of the following chapters will take one example of an encounter with “foreign” peoples (Jews, Muslims, black Africans, and Atlantic cultures) in Florence at about the time
Lippi was completing the
Barbadori Altarpiece
as a starting point for setting the Renaissance relationship with the wider world in the broader context of culture, society, and ideas. And as the broadening horizons of Lippi’s Florence are uncovered, it becomes clear that hidden beneath the civilized and sophisticated surface of contemporary art and literature lurked a very ugly Renaissance indeed.

11

S
ALOMONE’S
C
RIME

S
ALOMONE DI
B
ONAVENTURA
was a prosperous and, by all accounts, upstanding member of the community in early-fifteenth-century Tuscany. He always put his family first. He was a dutiful son and was a good and caring husband. He was also a proud father and doted on his two young boys with a touching concern for their education and well-being. Like any decent chap of the period, Salomone worked hard to make sure that they wanted for nothing. Having gone into business with his own father, Bonaventura, in 1422, he had built a career as a successful moneylender whose honesty and integrity were respected by clients and partners alike.

The bulk of Salomone’s business was done in the little town of
Prato, about ten miles from Florence. Regular as clockwork, he handed over the annual payment of 150 florins to the Florentine treasury for the renewal of his license and ran a thoroughly respectable trade with few causes for complaint. Of course, like anyone, he had the odd enemy. But in itself this was nothing to worry about. Florence was a hotbed of malicious gossip and petty backbiting, and the competitive world of Renaissance commerce had always been riddled with jealousies and rivalry.

By 1439, Salomone was keen to expand his business. Profits had been rising steadily, and having purchased a privilege from the papal chancellery allowing him to extend his operations to
Borgo San Sepolcro in 1430, he was now looking for fresh opportunities. Treasury officials had already hinted that he might soon be able to set up shop in Florence itself, and when his friend
Abraham Dattili unexpectedly approached him about forming a partnership to lend money at the invitation of the Florentine government, Salomone jumped at the chance. It was too good to pass up.

From the surviving evidence, however, Salomone appears to have been a cautious man.
Perhaps conscious of the fact that certain Florentines
might try to undermine him if he was too obvious about his ambitions, Salomone took the precaution of putting his sons’ names down instead of his own when the contracts of incorporation were drawn up. It was, perhaps, a wise thing to do. At the time, the practice of money lending was strictly regulated, and although he himself did not yet have permission to trade in Florence, Salomone appears to have believed that by administering the business on his sons’ behalf, he would be sure of staying within the bounds of the law.

For two years, everything went smoothly. But then, in 1441, Salomone’s world suddenly and dramatically fell apart. What he thought was the perfect scheme really wasn’t. Without any warning, he was hauled in front of the courts in Florence and falsely accused of breaking the law. Although his children were officially Dattili’s partners, the prosecutors pointed out that Salomone was actually running the business. And since Salomone did not have permission to lend money in Florence, they said, he was clearly perpetrating a crime. Valiantly, Salomone tried to argue that since he had never traded in his own name, but merely on his children’s behalf, he had done nothing worthy of censure. He was convinced that legal niceties would win through, and that trained lawyers would have to respect the city statutes. It was clearly a trumped-up charge lacking any basis in reality.

But Salomone could not have been more wrong. It didn’t matter that he was innocent. The trial was a fix from the very beginning. Having set its heart on buying the town of
Borgo San Sepolcro, the Florentine government needed money, and since it couldn’t raise the necessary sum by any legitimate means, the priors were determined to steal it from a suitably rich patsy. Salomone was the sacrificial lamb, and the court’s sole purpose was to strip him of every last penny.

Brushing his objections aside with a disdainful wave of the hand, the judge found Salomone guilty and handed him a fine of 20,000 florins. It was an incredible sum. It was twice what
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici had lent Baldassare Cossa to bribe his way to the papacy only thirty years before. It was, in fact, more than a king’s ransom. Salomone was ruined. His dreams were destroyed, his family left destitute.

News of the trial would have spread fast. But it is doubtful that any- one would have been surprised or even particularly bothered by the miscarriage of justice. Far from it. The chancellor,
Leonardo Bruni, had been kept informed about the progress of the trial, and—perhaps
because he was excited by the prospect of acquiring Borgo San Sepolcro—his letters clearly show that he believed Salomone’s condemnation to have been entirely justified. Yet it wasn’t that Bruni and the Florentines seriously believed he had broken the law. Rather, everyone would have known he was being punished for a quite different offense. Salomone’s “crime” was simply that he was Jewish.

T
USCANY AND THE
J
EWS

Despite his unusual prosperity and even more unusual persecution, Salomone di Bonaventura was a fairly typical member of Renaissance Italy’s thriving Jewish community, and given the society in which he had grown up, it was perhaps only natural that he should have expected fairness and justice from the Florentine court.

Jews had been resident in the peninsula since antiquity, and a fairly steady, although unremarkable, population appears to have been present in various cities through the Middle Ages. As the Renaissance began to get under way, however, the number of Jews living in Italy started to rise steadily. Forced to flee their homes in
Spain, Portugal, and (later)
Germany, they were attracted by the growing prosperity of Italian towns. The North, especially, seems to have exerted a particular pull. Cities such as Bologna,
Venice, Padua, and Milan welcomed Jewish groups not only from across the Alps but also from Rome and the kingdom of Sicily.
By the mid-fifteenth century, it has been estimated that there were more than two hundred Jewish communities extant in northern Italy alone.

In contrast to many other regions, such as Emilia and Lombardy, Tuscany did not have a particularly long history of Jewish settlement, but it, too, found itself the beneficiary of considerable immigration, and it is more than likely that Salomone’s father, Bonaventura, was among the many Jews who moved to
Prato in the early fifteenth century. The commercial boom offered unrivaled opportunities for the growth of new businesses, and many of the trades in which Jews of the period tended to specialize found a natural home in the urban landscape of fifteenth-century Tuscany.
At the time Salomone was embarking on his career as a moneylender, some four hundred had set themselves up in Florence, and perhaps only slightly fewer in Prato itself.

It was not the largest Jewish population in Italy—around 1,000 could be found in Venice, while no fewer than 12,500 were resident in the Papal
States at about the same time—but Jews nevertheless constituted a lively and vibrant part of urban society. In Florence, the majority tended to live in the northeast of the city, clustered around the site of the modern synagogue in the vicinity of Santa Croce, but a significant number of the less prosperous also found homes in the narrow, crowded streets near Filippo Lippi’s convent in Oltr’Arno. Quickly putting down roots, they integrated themselves into the fabric of Florentine life with admirable speed and tremendous efficiency. As one historian has observed, “
By the middle of the fifteenth century, it had become extremely difficult to distinguish Jews from Christians. They spoke the same language, lived in similar houses, and dressed with an eye to the same fashions.” Indeed, “Jews who settled in Italy from German cities were … shocked by the extent of assimilation among their Italian co-religionists.”
This was, of course, no more true than of those Jews who practiced the most highly respected professions (such as medicine) or whose success in commerce put them on a par with Florence’s wealthiest bankers, and the Jewish elite found a ready place in the upper echelons of civic society. Even from the few details known about his earlier life, it is at least clear that
Salomone di Bonaventura was among the most readily assimilated.

Jewish integration into the urban life of northern Italian cities was undoubtedly facilitated by the valuable roles they played in Renaissance society.
Taking advantage of the city’s commercial prowess, many of Florence’s Jews embarked on careers in speculative trade (particularly in precious stones and metals) and money lending, and it is no surprise that one of the earliest known Jewish residents,
Emanuel ben Uzziel da Camerino, was engaged in exactly these professions. Often operating out of smaller settlements outside Florence itself, Jewish moneylenders, in particular, found themselves snowed under with clients. Since usury laws technically forbade Christians to charge interest, Jewish moneylenders fulfilled a necessary economic function, and because they were frequently willing to lend where others would not, they provided much-needed oil for the wheels of the Tuscan economy. Injecting essential capital into ventures of all sizes, some—like Salomone di Bonaventura—became so prosperous as a result that they were even able to extend loans of a scale to match that of the more established merchant bankers, and it was, indeed, Jewish moneylenders who were called upon to provide
Pope Martin V with funds when Christians were unable to meet his requirements.

Yet the roles played by the Jewish community in Italian—and especially Florentine—society also went far beyond commerce. Jews often possessed skill sets in an abundance that made them quite indispensable to social existence. Particularly in the later Renaissance, Jewish doctors—whose training had often brought them into closer contact with Arabic and Greek bodies of knowledge than their gentile colleagues—acquired a high standing and were much sought after. Elsewhere, such as in
Mantua and
Milan, “dynasties” of Jewish doctors proved themselves so invaluable that generations of medics were granted positions of favor and esteem at court.

Given the prominent role Jews played in Italian life, it was perhaps unsurprising that Jews should have enjoyed a certain measure of tolerance and respect that extended not only to commerce and patronage but also to the structures of law and politics. The papacy, for example, had long been eager to preserve the rights and privileges of Rome’s Jewish population. As long ago as 598, Gregory the Great had declared that the Jews “
should not encounter any prejudice with regard to those privileges that have been granted them,” and this belief had moved thirteenth-century pontiffs to
accord them the status of Roman citizens. Only three years before Salomone set up in business with his father—that is, in 1419—
Pope Martin V had gone one step further and proclaimed that Jews

should not be molested by anyone in their synagogues; nor should their laws, statutes, customs and ordinances be interfered with … ; nor should they be molested in person or in any way beyond legal obligation; at no time should they be required by anybody to bear any distinctive sign.

As in Rome, so often in Florence. Though Jews were a distinct minority within the Florentine commune, their position was carefully set out in communal statutes, and they were occasionally entrusted with important ad hoc political positions when diplomatic or financial need required. Indeed, it is telling that one historian has been moved to observe that “
by the standards of the age, Florence was a remarkably tolerant community,” while another has optimistically noted that even toward the end of the period “
the Jews felt protected by the legal system, and knew that they could find in the civil courts the principal defenders
of their rights.” It was not uncommon for Tuscan Jews to extol the merits both of Florence and of those Florentines who supported them, especially in later years. For
the enthusiastically effusive Yohanan
Alemanno, for example, Lorenzo de’ Medici was a latter-day King Solomon, the archetype of the ideal Jewish ruler.

In addition to pragmatic concerns, there were powerful cultural reasons for cities like Florence to welcome Jews enthusiastically into the community. Particularly in the mid-fifteenth century, Jews played an increasingly important role in intellectual life. With many of them becoming influential humanists in their own right, they played a key part both as agents of cultural transmission and as disseminators of Hebraic knowledge. Following the itinerant life of many other contemporary scholars,
Judah Messer Leon (Judah ben Jehiel Rofe; ca. 1420/5–ca. 1498) wrote a number of important commentaries on philosophical works by
Aristotle and
Averroës, and composed a noted treatise on oratory (
the
Nofet zufim
, or
The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow
) that drew on the paradigms of Latin eloquence and on Mosaic texts. In turn, Messer Leon’s pupil Yohanan Alemanno (also known as Johanan Alemanno; ca. 1435–post 1504) was both the author of philosophically rich Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah and an educator of some note, responsible for introducing
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—who “
gathered a school of Jewish scholars who aided him in his search for religious syncretism”—to Hebrew.

Religious factors, too, provided strong encouragement for Jews to be welcomed into the social whole as equal and active participants in the drama of the Renaissance. It was, after all, an article of faith that Christ had been born a Jew and had been persecuted because of his supposed claim to be the “king of the Jews.” It was impossible for even the crudest theologian to ignore the fact that—as Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity had common roots, and that the prophets of the Old Testament were celebrated in like fashion in the Torah. Later in the fifteenth century,
Marsilio Ficino “
maintained that the writings of Jewish Cabalists … were in agreement with the teachings of Christianity,” and had no hesitation in writing of the shared truths of the two religions. Florentines were not ashamed of proclaiming the place of Jews within the Christian tradition in urban rituals. During the celebrations on the feast of
Saint John the Baptist in 1454, for example, the pageant included a cycle of scenes from biblical history from the Creation
to the Resurrection, each episode of which was represented by a group of prominent citizens thought to have particular ties to that moment in the religious drama.
When it came to depicting Moses, the figure of the prophetic lawgiver was surrounded by “leaders of the people of Israel,” all of whom were played by Florentine Jews. The city’s Jewry, in other words, was accorded as visible a part in the celebration of Florence’s urban identity as its Christian confraternities.