The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune by Carol LansingReview by: Julius KirshnerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 5 (Dec., 1992), pp. 1505-1506Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2165974 .

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Medieval 1505

matters, these now being delegated to a sovereign bailiff.

In general I agree with Kittell's thesis that from ad hoc financial duties there developed the financial routine of a well-defined department. But I do ques- tion some conclusions and statements. Although she does give some credit to those Italian financiers such as Gerard Lupichimi and Thomas Fini who served as receivers under Guy de Dampierre and Robert de B6thune, Kittell does not give enough credit for their financial innovations and their techniques for obtain- ing loans. Although the author contends that the receiver general and his department did not evolve as did the English exchequer, this is not completely accurate. Both came from the respective households with similar stages of development. The author also attempts to account for the lethargy of Flemish finan- cial administration, but her answer that autonomous groups in Flanders were obstacles to financial central- ization is not convincing. With the abundant eco- nomic savoir-faire all about them, did the counts and countesses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rule with their eyes closed? These queries only un- derline the qualities of this fine study, which will enlighten all those interested in medieval finance and banking.

BRYCE LYON Brown University

CAROL LANSING. The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1991. Pp. xv, 265. $45.00.

Carol Lansing numbers among the small group of Anglophone historians conducting research on Flo- rence before the Renaissance. With justification she argues that the citizens of Renaissance Florence had only a vague notion of how their city was radically transformed from a modest medieval town domi- nated by more than 150 towers of noble families to a crowded, bustling metropolis with a construction that reflected both the dominance of the city's commercial and industrial guilds and a nascent civic ideology. Almost a century ago a young Italian historian, Gae- tano Salvemini, sought to demonstrate that there were two driving forces behind these economic and political transformations: first, the violent rivalry be- tween a class of overbearing rentier magnates and a group of popolani families who derived their wealth from commerce and industry, and, second, the city's conquest of the surrounding countryside. Salvemini's model of class conflict was smashed to pieces in 1926 with the blunt instruments of iconoclasm and anti- Marxism wielded by Nicola Ottokar, a Russian Emigre scholar. He believed that the constitutional settle- ments of the late trecento, especially the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, which had been designed by the popolani regime to pacify the magnates and exclude them from the highest magistracies, were not shaped

by determinate economic interests but by constant jockeying for power within a relatively inelastic ruling class. Thanks mainly to the research of several gen- erations of Italian scholars, our picture of this period has been considerably enriched and modified. None- theless, Lansing contends that such research is want- ing because it remains predicated on terms staked out by the debate originating with Salvemini and Ottokar and perpetuated by their respective adherents. She also criticizes the tendency of historians to treat twelfth and thirteenth-century Florence as a mere prologue to the Renaissance.

Her own laudable goal is to offer a thickly contex- tualized history of the Florentine nobility, focusing on its origins, structures, collective properties, gender relations, rhetorical strategies, and masculinized aris- tocratic values. Rural noble families coalesced into dynastic lineages around 1000 to pool resources in a time of rapid demographic and economic change and to preserve their patrimonies, patronage rights over church property, and titles by limiting transmission of property to a single, male line. Lansing defines lin- eage as descent groups of kin relations, with large lineages splitting into branches, each c6nstituting a lineage in itself. By the thirteenth century, these lineages had become urban patrilineal descent groups that "enlarged the family by defining a large group of individuals as kinsmen, joined together by common ancestry" (p. 37). Departing from the conventional wisdom that urban life weakened lineages, Lansing insists that the solidarity of urban lineages actually increased, and she illustrates this in chapters devoted to joint lineage property and fortifications. In turn, the increased stress on solidarity led to instability within patricentric lineages and to the transgressive behavior of women such as Beata Umliana dei Cerchi, who, by refusing to further her family's interests through matrimony, had renounced her lineage role. Marriage, as everyone knows and as the author demonstrates once again, played a crucial role in promoting reconciliation between warring lineages, as well as in creating new alliances. Some noble families were especially notorious for their arrogance, lawlessness, and propensity for violence. The chief culprits, Lansing argues, were young nobles who acted out the martial values associated with knight- hood.

Lansing's scholarship has the virtue of being broad- based, independent-minded, and self-reflective. Her translations of Italian and Latin texts are uncom- monly reliable and lucid. I find superficial and un- warranted, however, many of her observations on women, dowries, and inheritance. She states matter- of-factly that fathers generally included in their wills a clause that excluded from inheritance daughters with dowries, but she fails to supply any evidence for her assertion. Evidence is forthcoming for the obser- vation that some sons had to be compelled by the courts to restore dowries to their widowed mothers, but she does not suggest any explanation as to why

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1992

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1506 Reviews of Books

this was so. Testamentary clauses providing support (alimenta) to wives, sisters, and other female kin were formulaic expressions of a fundamental legal and moral obligation rather than just expressions of af- fectionate paternalism, as she supposes. No explana- tion, apart from affectionate maternalism, is enlisted for the intergenerational transmission of property between female kin, even though the absence of male heirs, who were legally entitled to a portion of their mothers' dowries, must have significantly affected the devolution of women's property. Without a consider- ation of bequests made by women to male kin, the bracketing of "a distinct female network of inherit- ance" is misplaced and misleading. This list could be expanded. Ultimately, though, these shortcomings should not obscure Lansing's achievement in break- ing fresh ground and providing signposts for scholars working on medieval Florence.

JULIUS KIRSHNER

University of Chicago

PAULA C. CLARKE. The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 1991. Pp. ix, 293. $74.00.

In this deeply and meticulously researched book, Paula C. Clarke shows the extent of Nicolai Rubin- stein's influence on his students. Taking her method- ological and conceptual cues very much from her teacher, she follows an Ottokarian or Namierite ap- proach to the study of Florentine politics. The issue on which she focuses her attention is the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of two brothers, Tommaso Soderini and Niccol6 Soderini, scions of one of the city's premier lineages, following substantially diver- gent, and eventually conflicting paths in their pursuit of political fortune. Tommaso, at least until 1470-71, was one of the staunchest and more inflexible parti- sans of the Medici. For his part, Niccolo turned out to be a thorn in the side of the Medici and, in the wake of a failed conspiracy in 1466, was exiled from Florence, broke his ban as an exile, was declared a rebel, and died in 1474 not only without ever return- ing to his native city but also apparently without ever again seeing his brother. While presenting the case of the Soderini brothers, Clarke fails to note that there were other cases of such sharp political cleavage among Florentine siblings and that there already exists a subtle interpretation of such division in the case of the Guicciardini brothers in the early six- teenth century (Randolph Starn, "Francesco Guicciar- dini and His Brothers," Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron [1971], 409-44). Clarke nevertheless fol- lows the trail of the brothers' careers through the maze of extant documentation, teasing out fragments from a variety of sources in Florence and other Italian archives and showing in the process a good command of those sources.

The book's substance comprises nine chapters, each of which concentrates on a chronological or topical problem. Clarke follows the careers of the brothers, placing their action in a context of broader developments or historiographical discussions. She addresses political issues, economic activities, familial life, and relations with friends and neighbors. She is faithful to the sources throughout (although an eru- dite book such as this would have been much more useful had she quoted her sources more generously and in the original language) and shows herself aware of and sensitive to recent interpretations of Floren- tine history advanced mostly by Anglophone histori- ans. One notable and surprising omission is Elio Conti's fundamental book, L'imposta diretta a Firenze nel Quattrocento (1427-1494) (1984), which would have given Clarke a firmer grasp on the complex issue of public finances. Nor, despite her citation of Samuel Cohn's book (The Laboring Classes in Renais- sance Florence [1980]), does she seem aware of his interpretation of the social geography of marriage alliances among members of the city's leading lin- eages.

Clarke's discussions provide rich detail, although I would have profited from firmer and more pointed guidance of the author's overall interpretation and the conceptual direction in which she wishes to take her readers. Clarke emphasizes the brothers' per- sonal attributes and failures and suggests that, against the backdrop of a number of well-known "structures" (my expression, not hers) of Florentine politics and society, these personal qualities shaped their careers and fates. It comes as a pleasant surprise, then, to reach the book's conclusion, where Clarke sets out the main lines of an interpretation of Florentine politics at variance with an Ottokarian vision of politics. Political life, she concludes, did involve substantive issues. It was not-as one might have gathered from reading her preceding chapters-simply a quest for the particulare, and political conflict turned on vital principles and collective issues that "were sometimes hidden under personal rivalries" (p. 268). Had Clarke written the body of her book with her conclusion in mind, she would have produced a major and original contribution to the historiography of late-medieval Florentine politics. As it is, she has written a solid book, and one only wishes that she will now turn to her conclusion and use that as a basis for a general and comprehensive analysis of Florentine politics. In this quest, she will profit from a consideration of John Najemy's recent and powerfully suggestive essay ("The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics," in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy [1991], 269-88), in which he advanced a view of fifteenth-century Florentine politics very much con- sonant with the views that Clarke presents in her book's conclusion.

ANTHONY MOLHO

Brown University

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1992

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