Abstract
In contrast to the neo-Weberian institutionalist approach to the study of state-building and legitimacy, this chapter reconstructs the process of state formation in terms of close connections among several factors: the practice of feud and banditry, the role of local kin groups, dispute settlement and judicial administration, arbitration and compensation, and relations between center and periphery. The larger context is the Republic of Genoa between the sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries; the particular examples come from a portion of eastern Liguria. These very cases, apparently marginal ones, when investigated deeply and in microscopic fashion, can be symptomatically valuable. They can reveal more broad and general historical realities, and they can ultimately play a decisive role in verifying and questioning interpretive categories and established models, even creating new ones.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Chabod’s model, the development of the state was common to the various European realities, and was measured by the growth of the institutions and functions of central power and by the formation of a bureaucracy . Its frame of reference was the constitution of royal absolutism. See also the collected studies in Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin, 1967) and Lo Stato e la vita religiosa a Milano nell’epoca di Carlo V (Turin, 1971). On Chabod’s importance for recent historiography see E. Fasano Guarini’s introduction to the volume Potere e società negli Stati regionali italiani del ‘500 e ‘600 (Bologna, 1978), 7–47, in which a work by Chabod of 1958 (“Usi ed abusi nell’amministrazione dello Stato di Milano a mezzo il ‘500,” in Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe per il suo 80° compleanno [Florence, 1958]) is referred to as an indication of “continuity” (14).
- 2.
This is also the case for the important studies edited by Charles Tilly in The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975 [Italian edition published in 1984]).
- 3.
However, a critical assessment of the notions of popular and elite (or dominant) culture, along with the study of practices, concrete forms of communication, and social conflicts (including the rediscovery of the event as a mirror of broader realities) seem to have radically transformed perspectives for reconstructing political action. For an interesting example of political history—that combines the history of an event, biography, the reconstruction of a context, and an effort to situate political happenings within social structures, see E. Barnavi and R. Descimon, La Sainte Ligue, le juge et la potence (Paris, 1985).
- 4.
Generally, binary classifications flatten out a multiform world, cancelling out anything that they fail to incorporate. Dichotomous kinds of explanation have also characterized research on “peripheral centers” and numerous recent community studies. These interpretive models have recently been critiqued on the basis of case studies from the medieval and early modern periods in a special issue of Quaderni storici (issue 63, 1986) entitled Conflitti locali e idiomi politici.
- 5.
See G. Chittolini, La formazione dello Stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin, 1979). In this work, the contado is the terrain on which institutional state-building is verified. Here, the problem of state-building is addressed according to a Weberian perspective of disciplining and the acquisition of a monopoly over the legitimate public use of force (viii). The definition of the regional state as the main kind of state formation in Italy is also found in Fasano Guarini (Potere e società negli Stati regionali, 20). In a recent programmatic article, Chittolini takes up the theme of the growth and concentration of state powers , or the increasingly regulatory ability of the prince, as his principal research question. According to this perspective, the various elements recently uncovered in new community studies and in research on local social formations would be viewed with respect to the history of the state and its long-term evolutionary trends. Conflicts would be understood as problems of public order, on the scale of the state. See G. Chittolini, “Stati padani, ‘Stati del Rinascimento’: problemi di ricerca,” Persistenze feudali e autonomie comunitative in stati padani fra Cinque e Seicento, ed. G. Tocci (Bologna, 1988), 9–29, esp. 25–27.
- 6.
This event was promptly mentioned by Jean Bodin in his Les Six livres de la République (Paris, 1583), 956–58 (whose original edition was published in 1576). The first Italian translation was published in Genoa in 1588 by Lorenzo Conti (I sei libri della Repubblica …) but the section relating to Genoa and the events of 1575 (book six, pp. 620–24, “Della Republica di Genova”) was altered by the translator.
- 7.
On Venice , see G. Cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini. Ricerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice-Rome, 1958). On the Italian patriciates see the summary by Cesare Mozzarelli, “Stato, patriziato e organizzazione della società nell’Italia moderna,” in Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 2 (1976): 421–512.
- 8.
See, for example, Rellatione di Genova (1597), in the Archivio di Stato di Genova (hereafter, ASG), Manoscritti e libri rari, ms. 117 (the Rellatione has been attributed to either Matteo Senarega or Giacomo Mancini), and also the anonymous Dialoghi sopra la Repubblica di Genova e suo governo, origine tanto delle famiglie vecchie, come nuove, et altri particolari (1623), in ASG, Manoscritti e libri rari, ms. 859. See also the works by C. Costantini, F. Vazzoler, C. Bitossi, R. Gallo, and D. Ortolani in Dibattito politico e problemi di governo a Genova nella prima metà del Seicento, special issue of Miscellanea Storica Ligure (7, 2 [1975]).
- 9.
Andrea Spinola, Ricordi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Genova, ms. B. VIII, 25–29. See C. Bitossi, “Andrea Spinola. L’elaborazione di un ‘manuale’ per le classe dirigente,” in Dibattito politico, 115–75; Andrea Spinola, Scritti scelti, ed. C. Bitossi (Genoa , 1981). Spinola wrote in around 1620.
- 10.
The term portico was understood at the time as an expression that was the equivalent of fattione . A nice description of porticoes as an element of urban architecture is found in the Dialoghi (see note 8).
- 11.
These were the largest families who had at least six houses in the city: the twenty-eight alberghi made up of around 600 surnames. See G. A. Ascheri , Notizie storiche intorno alla riunione di famiglie in Alberghi a Genova (Genoa, 1846).
- 12.
This assessment had already been suggested by Uberto Foglietta, Della Republica di Genova libri due (Rome, 1559).
- 13.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the provincial nobility was also engaged in constructing family trees that in some cases went back to the year 1000. A significant example is offered by the noble houses of Chiavari: the Ravaschiero, Rivarola, and Della Torre. In the genealogical tree of the Della Torre , submitted to the Senate for approval in 1591, the founding forefather was noble Coruvolus de Turris, who was alive in the year 1000 (Archivio Storico del Comune di Chiavari, Fondo Maschio-Torre). In the Dialoghi of 1623, the objection made to the proposal to “make marriages in order to bring about an atmosphere of peace, and to create kinship ties together, so that ultimately the blood will be mixed” was that “the root always remains.” This was an argument that was very similar to what we will find in the kin groups of eastern Liguria .
- 14.
Rellatione.
- 15.
See C. Bitossi, “Famiglie e fazioni a Genova 1576–1657,” Miscellanea Storica Ligure 12, 2 (1980): 59–135; G. Doria and R. Savelli , “‘Cittadini di governo’ a Genova: ricchezza e potere tra Cinque e Seicento,” Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica 10, 2 (1980): 277–355.
- 16.
E. Grendi, “Capitazioni e nobiltà genovese in età moderna,” Quaderni storici 26 (1974): 403–44 (also in id., La repubblica aristocratica dei genovesi [Bologna, 1987], 13–48).
- 17.
M. Aymard, “La transizione dal feudalesimo al capitalismo,” in Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 1, Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 1131–92; Chittolini , La formazione dello Stato regionale. In the 1620s–1630s, when the nobility was struggling with the European monarchies and engaged in a diplomatic effort to obtain royal rank and symbols, Genoa enclosed itself within its walls (isolating itself from the three nearby curiae, or districts, of Bisagno, Polecevera, and Voltri); these walls were imposing and indefensible in equal measure; see E. Poleggi and P. Cevini, Genova (Bari, 1981).
- 18.
Rellatione; Adorno and Fregoso are the names by which the Genoese factions are traditionally referred.
- 19.
See Famiglie nobili orionde da Rapallo, e sua giurisdizione c’hanno in diversi tempi governato la Ser.ma Republica di Genova. Con loro Arme, e distinzion’ de’ Colori (seventeenth century), in Biblioteca della Società Economica di Chiavari, ms. 3.Y.II.21. This anonymous manuscript may safely be attributed to Gio Agostino Molfino , a jurist of Rapallo, and was written during the later decades of the 1600s. In a letter of 1694, Molfino wrote to Gio Carlo Canitia in Cadiz that “for many years, I have collected Historical Memoirs, with great difficulty and at great expense.” See also Angelo Della Cella , Delle famiglie indigene, avventiccie, nobili, popolari, estinte e vigenti a Chiavari (eighteenth century), ibid., ms. 3.C.II.I, and Carlo Garibaldi, Memorie di Chiavari sino al 1800 (eighteenth century), ibid., ms. 3.J.III.12.
- 20.
Famiglie nobili. Gio Agostino Molfino reconstructed the stories of about 100 families from the jurisdiction of Rapallo who were registered as nobles or tied to the Genoese alberghi (but in a letter, he writes that he had traced down about 300). Among these were thirteen families originating from the backcountry valleys, “where there are many that are not registered” who according to Molfino boasted kinship ties with noble citizens (in Genoa, a few decades earlier, it was said that “there are an infinite number of Spinola who dig the dirt up in those mountains”). Various families from Rapallo had taken part in the creation of the large alberghi of the De Franchi and the Giustiniani during the fourteenth century. Molfino ’s genealogical and antiquarian research, mixed together with historical reality, myth, and invention, probably resembled that carried out by (or for) many European patriciates during that time period. But the aim of Molfino’s documentary excavation was to reconstruct the ties between the kin groups of Rapallo and the Genoese nobles registered in the Liber Civilitatis, thereby shedding light on the common matrix of local and Genoese society. This matrix, as we will see, was also the foundation of the principle by which social relations were classified—the kin group ( parentella ). Seventeenth-century Genoese commissioners seemed to have borrowed this notion from local contexts that had not experienced a transformation similar to the oligarchic one of the city-capital, and whose traditional sociopolitical forms were stronger and more active. In around 1620, Andrea Spinola expressed his hope for a process of territorial integration through marriage (Ricordi, entry entitled “Maritar le figlie per le Riviere”), and also proposed the creation of kinship ties between the portici in order to create unity in the city (ibid., entry entitled “Matrimoni”).
- 21.
The letter is inserted into the manuscript of Gio Agostino Molfino cited in note 19.
- 22.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1116.
- 23.
See R. Savelli , “Potere e giustizia. Documenti per la storia della rota criminale a Genova alla fine del ‘500,” Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica 5 (1979): 33–66.
- 24.
Andrea Spinola, “Discorso sopra il presente governo di Genova,” in Scritti scelti, 79.
- 25.
ASG, Archivio Segreto-Propositionum, busta 1027, ff.
- 26.
This was the judgment of the commissioner Ambrosio Lomellino in 1580; see ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 512.
- 27.
Andrea Spinola, “Scritto che può servire a coloro che vanno a governare in vari luoghi della Republica” and “Delli comissari,” in Scritti scelti, 273–86. Andrea Spinola shared his colleagues’ pessimism about the Republic’s subjects, and was aware of the difficulties faced by Genoese officials who sought to impose their system of authority over the communities: “One must know … that the men of these places, and especially those who try to assert themselves, are experts in laying traps to capture the officer’s will, and in taking their measure and judging them from head to toe” (ibid., 274).
- 28.
See G. Cozzi, Repubblica di Venezia e Stati italiani. Politica e giustizia dal secolo XVI al secolo XVIII (Turin, 1982). In Venice , the oligarchic model with the idea of justice as a political instrument was embodied by the Council of Ten (ibid., 147–216).
- 29.
Commissioners had almost exclusively judicial functions and never became financial administrators or tools of administrative centralization as they did in seventeenth-century France ; see R. Mousnier, “Recherches sur la création des intendants des provinces, 1643–1648,” in Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung. Festgabe für Fritz Hartung (Berlin, 1958) (Italian trans. in Lo stato moderno, vol. 3, Accentramento e rivolte, ed. E. Rotelli and P. Schiera [Bologna, 1974], 107–26). But see also R. Harding’s important book Anatomy of a Power Elite. The Provincial Governors in Early Modern France (New Haven and London, 1978), which linked the birth of the intendants to procedures for conflict resolution. For an Italian case study, see S. Lombardini , “La costruzione dell’ordine: governatori e governati a Mondovì (1682–1687),” in La guerra del sale (1680–1699), ed. G. Lombardi, 3 vols. (Milan, 1986), 1: 179–227.
- 30.
B. Lenman and G. Parker, “The State, the Community and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe,” in Crime and Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. V. A. C. Gatrell , B. Lenman, and G. Parker (London, 1980). In this dichotomous model, the “law of the state” implies a radical acculturation of its subjects.
- 31.
There has recently emerged a new interest in relations between juridical history and the social sciences; see for example Storia sociale e dimensione giuridica, ed. P. Grossi, Acts of an international conference held in Florence, 26–27 April, 1985 (Milan, 1986), in which the option of either a social history that studies judicial documentation and analyzes juridico-institutional issues, or a more refined institutional history, remains completely open.
- 32.
On this issue and similar ones developed in preceding paragraphs, see the reflections of E. Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” in Quaderni storici 35 (1977): 506–20, esp. 512, and also C. Ginzburg and C. Poni , “Il nome e il come: scambio ineguale e mercato storiografico,” Quaderni storici 40 (1979): 181–90, esp. 187–88.
- 33.
See the observations of G. Duby , Le dimanche de Bouvines (Paris, 1973) (Italian trans. La domenica di Bouvines [Turin, 1977]), esp. 9: “since the event is in itself extraordinary, the exceptionally deep traces that remain of it are echoes of things which, in ordinary life, are not discussed or rarely mentioned; these clues gather together, in a specific place and time, a bundle of information on ways of thinking and acting” (my emphasis). See also N. Zemon Davis , Le retour de Martin Guerre (Paris, 1982) (Italian trans. Il ritorno di Martin Guerre [Turin, 1984], in which see especially the afterword by C. Ginzburg ).
- 34.
Issues of documentation, of the ways in which facts are manifested in different contexts, and of the scale of observation are at the center of the famous (and very rich in terms of research suggestions, which even today have only been partly pursued) essay by M. Bloch , “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes” (1928), in Mélanges historiques (Paris, 1963), 1: 16–40 (Italian trans. in Lavoro e tecnica nel Medioevo [Bari, 1977], 29–71, esp. 35–36).
- 35.
F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949) (Italian trans. Civiltà e imperi del Mediterraneo nell’età di Filippo II [Turin, 1953]); I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974) (Italian trans. Il sistema mondiale dell’economia moderna, vol. 1, L’agricoltura capitalistica e le origini dell’economia-mondo europea nel XVI secolo [Bologna, 1982]); F. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, vol. 3, Les Temps du monde (Paris, 1979) (Italian trans. Civiltà materiale, economia e capitalismo (secoli XV–XVIII), vol. 3, I tempi del mondo [Turin, 1982]).
- 36.
This history of political anthropology coincides substantially with the history of how the structural-functionalist paradigm was gradually superseded, beginning with what can be considered the foundational text of this discipline: African Political Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxford, 1940). The construction of new interpretive categories arose through the multiplication of ethnographic studies and the shifting of attention toward complex societies. Something similar happened in historiography with the discovery of new themes and the tendency to study non-privileged social groups. The encounter between history and anthropology took place precisely on these grounds. For some of the most significant works of political anthropology see the notes for Chaps. 8 and 10. Generally, see J. Vincent, “Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 7 (1978): 175–94.
- 37.
On this point see the observations of A. Momigliano, “Rapporto provvisorio sulle origini di Roma” (1962), in Storia e storiografia antica (Bologna, 1987), 211–12.
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Raggio, O. (2018). Introduction. In: Feuds and State Formation, 1550–1700. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94643-6_1
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