PROBLEMS: SOME ATTITUDES

Austrian and German historians have done much work on the beginnings of the central European crisis. The survey of Austrian history by Hugo Hantsch presents a conservative, pro-Habsburg view; the liberal textbook by Erich Zöllner, Geschichte Österreichs, attempts a more balanced assessment of the conflict. The interesting work by the Austrian historian Hans Stufmberger, taking a similar approach, expresses doubts whether either the Spanish or the Austrian Habsburgs were striving for absolutism. Like Sturmberger, Grete Mecenseffy sympathizes with Austrian Protestantism and the Estates' community, and there is a well-written survey of the situation by Karl Richter.

V. L. Tapié has devoted much attention to the seventeenth century in his studies of methods and problems in the history of central Europe. Habsburg problems have also been dealt with by A. Wandruszka and the Italian R. Belvederi. The articles by R. F. Schmiedt are also useful.

The monograph by J. B. Novák, Rudolf II and his Fall, has not yet been surpassed. The biography of the ‘Saturnian Emperor’ by Gertrude von Schwarzenfeld applies a more literary treatment and was apparently inspired by G. R. Hocke's work on Rudolphine Prague, the centre of European mannerist culture. But the best books now available are Rudolf II and his World by R. J. W. Evans and Bohemia and the Netherlands in the 16th Century by E. H. N. Mout.

PROBLEMS AND SOURCES

The central problems of the period 1643–50 are the final contraction of Spanish power, which was dealt a fatal blow by the revolutionary wave of 1640; the exclusion of England from European politics during the revolutionary years 1640–2; the dominance of conflict-ridden France over her Swedish and German allies; and Sweden's halfhearted attempts to decide the war on the battlefield, or at least to gain an advantageous position for diplomatic negotiations which would lead automatically to peace by compromise.

Besides the works about Spain that have already been mentioned (particularly those by Elliott) others calling for notice are the balanced survey by Juan Reglá, Introducción a la historia de España, and his article in the New Cambridge Modern History. Spain has also been the subject of work by V. Palacio, José Maria Jover, and M. Fraga Iribarne.

The basic recent work on England and her seventeenth-century revolution is by Christopher Hill. J. R. Jones has studied the position of England in Europe in the seventeenth century, particularly with reference to her relations with the United Netherlands. The same theme also attracted G. R. Boxer in his monograph of 1965.

In his studies B. F. Porshnev has argued that France under Mazarin was prompted by its struggle against revolutionary England and by its own internal crisis to a readier acceptance of the Peace of Westphalia which was not to the advantage of France's allies. I have analysed this point on the basis of Piccolomini's papers.

In recent years a good deal of attention has been given the problems of the nobility in early modern Europe: what changes did this dominant element in the ‘Estates’ community' undergo in various parts of Europe in this period of transition from feudalism to capitalism? The larger themes of the period, including the questions of the origin of absolutism, the class structure of society, and the nature of class tensions within society, have recently formed the subjects of two conferences. One, held at Moscow in 1966, was devoted to ‘theoretical and historiographical problems in the rise of capitalism’. The other, at Paris in 1968, considered problems of social stratification. At the Moscow conference A. N. Chistozvonov pointed to the need for further study of social changes in Austria, Prussia and Spain, while at Paris Roland Mousnier found among his colleagues only one who was concerned with these phenomena in central Europe: F. L. Carsten, whose contribution dealt with Brandenburg and Prussia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A general treatment of developments in the Habsburg lands has been provided by Victor L. Tapié in his chapter in the fourth volume of the New Cambridge Modern History. Here his authority for Bohemia was Otto Placht, whose conclusions he accepted quite uncritically, in spite of the serious difficulties that are described in the introduction to Placht's volume.

The members of the community of Altopascio fell within three classes, the peasantry, the leaseholders, and the notables. The term ‘class’ will not be used to identify groups of comparable income, but rather persons who share the same general relationship to the productive process. That relationship not only constitutes a common interest among members of the group but it also serves to differentiate the group from other ‘classes’ of the society with their own particular role in the system of production.

The peasants were the primary producers of the estate's revenues, so it is only fitting that a discussion of social classes and social structure should begin with them.

What, though, do we mean by ‘peasantry’? It is a start, but surely not enough, to describe peasants as rural cultivators. The anthropologist Professor Eric Wolf has made a distinction between peasants and other rural cultivators. Peasants are not farmers, i.e., entrepreneurs engaged in the business of commercial agriculture. The peasant is instead primarily occupied in satisfying the subsistence needs of his household. Professor Wolf also makes a helpful distinction between peasants and primitives:

When Professor E. J. Hobsbawm set forth his theory of the ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century, he reached almost at the outset for one of the most telling indices of a society's vitality, namely, the size of its population and its capacity to sustain population growth. He found that ‘the scattered figures for European population suggest, at worst an actual decline, at best a level or slightly rising plateau between the mounting slopes of the population curve in the later sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.’

Even within the small world of the village of Altopascio, population was a dynamic element that changed its course in response to both economic and natural forces, and in turn imposed alterations within the fabric of the community as a whole. Fortunately a good many records have survived that enable us to calculate the village population, along with its short-term fluctuations in size and long-term modifications of demographic behavior. The picture that emerges from all these data is consistent with the demographic trends outlined by Professor Hobsbawm as evidence for a general European crisis. At Altopascio, over the entire period from 1551 to 1784, the secular trend in absolute size of population divides into a long period of growth through 1647, then an abrupt decline, followed by more than a century of cyclical fluctuations around a static level.

The grand-ducal local representatives, as administrators of his property, had the right to exercise authority over the villagers of Altopascio. The grand duke delegated to the parish priest the duty of maintaining the moral welfare of his subjects and controlling the distribution of alms in the name of the church. The temporal authority to govern the village and to preserve order devolved upon the estate manager. The parish priest and the fattore were the two most important men in the village.

Perhaps no other role in this society is less suitable for generalization than that of the village priest, because the way in which he performed his duties was determined by intimate personal convictions which are unlikely to be recorded. Our task here is to situate the parish priest within the village community and to underline some of his characteristic functions.

The parish of Altopascio imposed its own particular requirements. On the one hand, its considerable charities required a capable and intelligent administrator; on the other hand, this rural parish had little to offer a sophisticated cleric. In an undated letter from the end of the sixteenth century, Senator Giovanbattista Capponi described the task of finding a parish priest in his letter to Signor Piero Usimbardi, the Secretary of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, the future grand duke.

A network of economic relations linked the glorious house of the Medici princes to the humble peasants who worked their lands, the leaseholders who rented them, and the artisans and shopkeepers who serviced both the estate and the village population. The economic changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not affect the landowner, his tenants, and his laborers in precisely the same way. At times the interests of these different groups placed them in stark opposition.

This and the two subsequent chapters will dissect the village economy, study its movement, and assess the welfare of its constituent parts. But the economic organization of the Medici lands will first be described before the performance of the economy over roughly two centuries is assessed. Our description might well begin by discussing the building blocks of any economic system – the factors of production: land, labor and capital.

It will be recalled that the estate sprawled over two different types of soil and terrain. The area of low hills or knolls, which was known as ‘cerbaia’ and characterized by tight yellow clay mixed with gravelly pebbles, contrasted with the expanse of low, flat land that lay in the Plain, rich in alluvial deposits but always threatened by the proximity of the rivers and the poor drainage that could ruin the crops. Whenever the water level in the Fucecchio lake or the Arno river changed the slope of the waters flowing off the Plain, the backlog impeded drainage, the crops suffered, and the land rendered little.

Every segment of the working population of Altopascio – the leaseholders, the village artisans and laborers, and the peasant sharecroppers – was indebted and unable to meet its obligations to the landlord. Accounts exist for the years between 1759 and 1765 that allow us to quantify the debt actually formed during those years by the average debtor in each group. The average of 103 leaseholders became indebted to the landlord for 14 scudi, the average of 10 artisan/laborers for 5 scudi, while 39 peasant households formed an average debt of 82 scudi, nearly six times the indebtedness of the average small farmer. The mezzadri of the grand duke were the most indebted of a poor and debt-ridden society.

On a purely individual basis a number of variables determined the amount of peasant indebtedness. The farms that composed the estate were not of equal size or quality. A larger and more fertile farm was naturally better suited to sustain a given peasant family than one that was small and less fertile. In line with this observation, those few peasant families of Altopascio who were not indebted at the end of the eighteenth century resided on the larger and more fertile farms carved out of land that had been reclaimed not long before. Size and quality were still not the only determinants because even peasants on good plots could and did become indebted.

The demographic composition of the family was another factor that influenced indebtedness.

With the panorama of life in Altopascio before us, I shall now address the specific problem of the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ and its impact upon the lives of the villagers.

The ‘crisis’ that struck this society was not a general one. There was certainly a severe economic crisis that accelerated the ruin of peasant producers and widened the gap between landlord, tenant, and small producer. This economic crisis provoked correlative changes in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the landlord along with a consolidation of a rural middle class. The economic changes did not, however, give rise to a political crisis either on the estate or in Tuscany as a whole. The peasants and the leaseholders of Altopascio developed techniques of expressing their economic grievances, but these instinctive forms of organization did not create any crisis of ‘society in its relations with the state,’ or any constitutional crisis on the order of the more famous examples of early modern European history. It is true that the worst phase of the crisis in the early decades of the eighteenth century did help to stimulate serious disaffection in Florence with the long rule of Grand Duke Cosimo III. But the political and social changes both within and beyond the village were never of the intellectual force or the quantitative magnitude to challenge the rule of the grand duke in Tuscany.

The bond between the villagers and the grand-ducal estate of Altopascio was comparable to that which might exist in a small industrial town where a single corporation dominates the lives of the residents. An idea of the community's identity can be drawn from its expression of grievance because therein lay the autonomous feelings of the community – independent reactions of groups and individuals which even this most powerful of landlords and the ruler of the state was unable to repress.

During these centuries of grand-ducal administration, three broad categories of expression most clearly articulated the grievances of the community: crime, violence, and out-right resistance.

Practically all the crime in this society was directly linked to the material condition of the criminal. The correspondence between Florence and Altopascio was very specific on this point. On 20 June 1716, for example, the Superintendent of the Royal Possessions in Florence wrote to the estate manager of Altopascio: ‘It does not surprise us that theft is continually on the rise in that part of the countryside, because the same is happening elsewhere, and the cause of it is the common misery.’

The prevalent crime was theft, which was difficult to prevent on the vast expanse of this estate, especially when the thieves were impoverished individuals acting out of desperation. In February 1695 the Royal Possessions reluctantly ordered the incarceration of Domenico Baccetti, who could not otherwise be stopped from stealing sticks and timber from the forest.