Tuscany in the age of empire

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i tatti studies in italian r enaissance history

Published in collaboration with I Tatti The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Florence, Italy

gener al editor Kate Lowe

TUSCANY in the AGE of EMPIRE 

BRIAN BREGE

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2021

Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Jacket image: Map of Italy (detail), 1578, by Stefano Bonsignori/ Wikimedia Jacket Design: Tim Jones ISBN 9780674258778 (Epub) ISBN 9780674258761 (PDF) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brege, Brian, 1985– author. Title: Tuscany in the age of empire / Brian Brege. Other titles: I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Series: I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020044805 | Subjects: LCSH: Tuscany (Italy)—Politics and government—1434–1737. | Tuscany (Italy)—Economic conditions—1434–1737. | Tuscany (Italy)—Foreign relations. Classification: LCC DG737.3 .B74 2021 | DDC 945/.506—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044805

For M.A.C.

CONTENTS

Introduction

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I. PAR ASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS 1

Finance and the Spanish Alliance

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2

Cooperative Empire

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3

The Northern European Alternative

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II. A GLOBAL TUSCANY 4

The Uses of Access

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The Shadow Capital

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III. THE TAIL WAGS THE DOG 6

The Tuscans in North Africa

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The Plot to Destroy the Ottoman Empire

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8

Persian Dreams

281

Epilogue

321

ABBREVIATIONS NOTES

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX

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Introduction

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n the heart of Florence, deep inside Palazzo Vecchio, is a room that encompasses the world. Cabinets originally designed to hold exotic wonders line every wall. Encircled by fifty-three maps of the world, the Guardaroba Medicea is both immersive and expansive, encouraging careful perusal of distant coasts and cities.1 Sparking the imagination and challenging the viewer’s knowledge, this fragment of the Late Renaissance illustrates Florence’s global outlook as it reinvented itself as a regional monarchy’s capital. From the 1560s until the early years of Grand Duke Cosimo II’s reign (r. 1609–1621), Florence sought to carve out a place for itself, not merely as a curious observer but as an active participant in the First Global Age. This study considers the global Florence that emerged in the half century symbolically bracketed by the lavish funeral for Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) that marked a Medici claim to Renaissance Florence’s artistic glory and Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) return to Florence in 1610 to serve as a glittering star of Cosimo II’s court. 2 By the final decade of Cosimo I’s (r.1537–1574) reign, the Medici had established a firm grip on Tuscany. 3 As Spanish imperial dominance 1

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at once protected Tuscany and prevented it from further expansion in Italy, the Medici sought opportunities further afield under Grand Dukes Francesco I (r. 1574–1587) and Ferdinando I (r.1587–1609). These Tuscan projects were manifold. Some involved research and collecting that brought seeds, animals, exotic luxuries, and a trove of information to Tuscany from places like Japan, China, India, and the Americas. Economic projects were similarly wide-ranging. Through the development of the free port of Livorno (Leghorn), creative deployment of financial capital, cooperation with the Dutch and English, and diplomatic maneuvering, the Medici sought to reap the riches of global trade. They bid for Portuguese pepper contracts, pursued the resources of Brazil, and explored joining the Dutch United East India Company (VOC: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie). Finally, through espionage, naval raiding, and diplomatic deals with figures like a rebel pasha in Syria and Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) in Iran, Tuscany tried to shatter the Ottoman Empire into a series of friendly successor states with which Tuscany could work.

Late Renaissance Tuscany in the World This study explores the manifold ways in which the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as a state interacted with the wider world. Nearly all the components of this framing are subject to interpretative complications, and so some definitions are in order. First, although the Grand Duchy of Tuscany officially came into being in 1569, Cosimo I de’ Medici’s regime had de facto control of almost all its territory by 1557. The major territorial, political, and international developments in Cosimo’s long reign make any sharp institutional and temporal definitions fraught, for shared personnel and political practices spanned the reign. The stabilization of Tuscany’s domestic frontiers in the 1550s opened space for international action, and the shifting military position of the major powers and return of sustained conflict to the Italian peninsula would close it. Thus, while some examples are drawn from early in Cosimo I’s reign, the focus is on the period from the fall of Siena (1555) to the immediate aftermath of Ferdinando I’s death and the winding up of his policies in the 1610s. In seeking to consider a segment of the seamless cloth of history, the pieces left aside for the time being by the historian’s choices must

INTRODUCTION

be frankly acknowledged. Most important are the private Florentines, often scions of patrician families, who operated at long-distance.4 This study considers the activities of private individuals only in so far as they interacted with its principal subjects, the Tuscan state and the ruling Medici dynasty. Private Florentines’ overseas activities sometimes overlapped with those of the state, but they also diverged in important ways, shaped principally by the lower political barriers to access and greater freedom of action private actors enjoyed. As a result, the state depended on their example and contacts to act at a distance far more than such individuals relied on Medici support; indeed, Florentine patricians’ overseas operations are such a large topic that I will consider them in a separate monograph. While drawing an analytical distinction between the state and private actors reflects the political restrictions that constrained the former more than the latter, important caveats bear consideration. The Tuscan state and the Medici dynasty were two internally diverse components of a new political order. In this arrangement, the Medici sought to concentrate de facto power in an inner group dependent on the prince, intentionally conflating state and private interests. By the 1560s, the arrangement sustained a solid monarchical polity on the ruins of ancient and querulous republics that had spent the better part of three centuries in recurring armed conflict. As the ancient tradition of plotting and staging armed interventions by exiles waned, Tuscany and its Medici princes assumed a more stable and prominent place on the international stage. Domestically, although the Medici ruled cities that had been famously politically precocious, from Cosimo I onward, Medici princes exercised legislative and executive control through a new administrative layer placed over existing structures of government and law. This system allowed Medici princes and their close associates to exercise great personal power when they elected to do so but also preserved a legally and politically variegated polity that crystallized much of the legal and administrative legacy of the Florentine and Sienese republics. 5 Such was Cosimo I’s success in developing the Tuscan state into an absolute monarchy, that his regime appeared in Marchamont Needham’s 1656 account of polities—from imperial Rome to the Ottomans and the king of France—whose princes had used salaried troops to assert absolute power.6 The actual process of co-opting the

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Florentine patriciate into the state’s burgeoning bureaucracy was vitiated by corruption and the persistence of politics within the nominally absolutist structures.7 As with many polities, then, Tuscany appeared more clearly to outsiders as a centralized state than it did internally. Although the Tuscan state was exiguous by modern standards and its absolutist pretensions only partially realized, there is value in using the historical actor’s category. Indeed, Florentines played a prominent part in developing the intellectual framework that would see the state as a distinct impersonal entity whose preservation and security were preeminent goals. Other thinkers, especially Italian and French ones, would develop the concept into the reason of state tradition.8 Having established a working sense of the Tuscan state, the definition of “wider world” with which it interacted remains to be settled. As an analytical category, I take the wider world to be defined as the negative space demarcated by a pair of interlinked ideas that had considerable currency in the period: Latin Christendom and Europe. If neither referred to entirely stable geographic entities, core areas fit by all definitions. Even so, both conceptions of space blurred at the boundaries, changed over time, and were not entirely coextensive even in the Renaissance. Of course, the idea of Europe and its appropriate boundaries remains sharply contested. Conventionally, major developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the Renaissance, printing, the Reformation, exploration, empire building, and intensive bouts of interstate warfare—collectively contributed to the idea of Europe displacing that of Latin Christendom. As with nearly any metageographic paradigm, there are nearly insoluble boundary-crossing cases, like the Ottoman Empire or Venice, whose constituent pieces fell on either side of dividing lines that depend on the political, geographic, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other criteria used. Then as now, multiple paradigms operated simultaneously in unresolved tension, as for instance between the perceived unities and divisions within and between Europe and the Mediterranean.9 For the purposes of this study, a working definition of the wider world is needed. For Tuscany in this period, such a definition can be provided by the boundaries of violence. Tuscany and the Tuscan-based and Medici-sponsored Order of Santo Stefano were actually or potentially in open-ended conflict with nearly the entire southern and eastern Mediterranean, usually on explicitly religious

INTRODUCTION

grounds. Therefore, in this study, the category of “wider world” is taken as the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean and places accessed through ocean travel outside Europe. Though definitionally challenging, the category of the wider world is a composite of political realities. In Latin Europe, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns claimed monopoly rights to all travel and commerce beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empire’s contemporaneous and similarly dramatic expansion gave it the power to control all traditional routes linking the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Although the Dutch and English challenged monopoly claims and developed a route through Muscovy and the Safavid Empire, this did not mark a substantial liberalization of commerce because rights of participation were still strongly politically mediated. Iberian monopoly claims, a geostrategic and religious inability to ally openly with Protestant challengers, and the sixteenth century militarization of the Mediterranean frontier meant that any Tuscan state action in the wider world was presumptively subject to political resistance escalating to concerted violence by more powerful states.10 To put the matter plainly, in legal and political terms, the Tuscan state ought not to have had anything to do with the wider world. And yet it did. This, then, is the central puzzle. How did Tuscany act at a distance and why did it elect to do so in the face of such resistance? This study explores Tuscany’s long-distance action analytically according to its modes of engagement. Tuscany briefly experimented with direct commerce and independent colonization, but its ventures amount to a counterpoint to Tuscany’s three primary approaches. I have organized these approaches analytically according to their type, but it should be recalled that the types do not represent chronologically distinct phases. Part 1 considers the Tuscan state’s efforts to develop a symbiotic partnership with Europe’s transoceanic powers starting first and foremost with the Spanish Habsburgs.11 From 1580 to 1640, the Portuguese and Spanish realms shared a Spanish Habsburg monarch in the Iberian Union, even as they were largely administered separately; I refer to these collectively as the Iberian empires. Building on strong dynastic, military, financial, religious, and strategic ties, the Medici persistently sought to embed the Tuscan state in the Iberian overseas empires through investments in monopoly commercial rights, direct

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trade, and subimperial colonial possessions under the aegis of Spanish Habsburg authority. For example, Tuscany pursued the monopoly contract for the distribution of Portugal’s spices in Europe and both the right to trade directly with and acquire a donatary captaincy in Brazil. What to Tuscans seemed like generous offers of deep symbiotic alliance could seem to the Iberians like an effort to parasitize their empires, depriving Iberians of their exclusive privileges and leaving them with the costs of empire. Stymied in their efforts to partner with the Iberians, Tuscans explored independent alternatives with Spain’s English and Dutch rivals. Tuscany considered a partnership with the VOC and Dutch proposals for trade with Brazil. Even Tuscany’s most direct challenge to monopoly claims—its expedition to the Amazon—relied on a form of partnership, in this case with the large community of English mariners in Tuscany’s primary port of Livorno. The unique character of the Amazon expedition points to the geopolitical structures that constrained Tuscany. In practice, then, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany’s participation in transoceanic ventures depended on negotiated partnership. If the efforts of the Tuscan state to act at long distance through formal partnerships and direct trade foundered on the rocks of political intransigence, its pursuit of the fruits of the wider world through other means met with success, if not with smooth sailing. Part 2 follows Tuscan agents, merchants, and diplomats as they wended their way through a thicket of administrative, legal, and political barriers. Such barriers proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even as technical and logistical constraints eased. Restrictions were a global phenomenon, not only protecting the nationals of the Atlantic empires, but also constraining European access to China, Japan, and Korea and to rights of transit trade across Muscovy.12 The problem of access to trade with and information, naturalia, and luxury imports from the wider world was, then, fundamentally a political one dependent on a combination of negotiated relationships and subterfuge.13 Whereas Tuscany largely failed in its quest to secure a formal political partnership with the great empires of its day, it was notably successful in achieving access to many of the fruits of those empires. So extensive and effective was the network of agents, affiliates, and diplomats that the Medici court overflowed with global goods

INTRODUCTION

and information. They supplied Medici dynastic collections well on the way to becoming famous museums and collecting institutions like libraries, menageries, villas, botanical gardens, and the Guardaroba. In parallel with the collections, Medici Tuscany saw a rapid growth in bodies devoted to processing objects, exotica, naturalia, and information.14 Beyond the University of Pisa and proliferating academies, they notably included the Galleria dei Lavori in Pietre Dure, the Fonderie of the Casino di San Marco, the botanical gardens, and the Tipografia Medicea Orientale. This abundance enabled Medici Tuscany to play an unusually central role both as a diplomatic hub for the exchange of global goods and as a critical center of intellectual and cultural engagement with the vastly expanded world to which Europeans now had regular maritime access. As a tool of analysis, I characterize Florence as acting as a shadow capital to the Iberian empires, although only in a few narrowly defined ways. Caveats are essential and bear noting at the outset. Tuscan troops and ships fought long and hard in support of the Spanish Habsburgs, but politically Florence was at best a secondary ally constrained to follow Madrid’s lead and limited in its ability to affect policy. Similarly, Tuscan financiers played an important role at crucial moments in keeping the Spanish imperial system operating, but Genoa was undoubtedly a much more important offshore financial center for Spain.15 The idea of the shadow capital, then, applies only to the efflorescence of institutional developments that left Florence with a hypertrophic infrastructure for collecting, refining, and redistributing global goods and information and an outsized diplomatic role.16 Whereas Tuscany’s transoceanic access depended in the final analysis on political arrangements with the Atlantic powers, in the Mediterranean, Tuscany possessed significant scope for independent military action. Not only did Tuscany’s Spanish alliance give it a mighty protector, but the grand duchy developed a formidable system of modern fortifications and a powerful amphibious assault force protected by a modern and effective navy. Part 3 explores how Tuscany sought to combine its independent hard power and diplomatic heft to reshape the politics of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean by being the tail that wagged imperial Spain into military adventures. For all their apparent incongruity, Tuscany’s ventures were neither quixotic nor ill-informed,

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even if they were ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, Tuscany’s explicit disavowal of territorial gains in favor of commercial, diplomatic, and religious objectives enabled Tuscany to engage in creative coalition building involving partnerships with political actors of widely varying power and legitimacy from Morocco, Cyprus, and Lebanon to Syria and Iran. These relationships were explicitly structured as pacts of mutual aid, which advanced the Grand Duchy of Tuscany’s commercial, religious, and strategic interests by mobilizing Tuscany’s resources and alliances to aggrandize friendly powers. Lacking either conquistadors or colonists, the grand duke carefully regulated the use of force and the distribution of diplomatic favors to carve out a distinct role. Tacitly, Tuscany’s strategy appears to have been nearly opposite that of Venice, and so the latter’s approach bears brief consideration here. As a legacy of half a millennium and more of maritime enterprise, Venice retained scattered overseas possessions, known as the Stato da Màr, until the end of the republic. They were governed by a rotating group of Venetian patricians, sometimes in collaboration with local elites, with the goal of serving the capital’s interests and protecting the Catholic hierarchy even in predominantly Orthodox lands. For all Venice’s naval might, its maritime empire slowly contracted under periodic Ottoman assaults. Fleeting victories notwithstanding, Venice could not sustain the struggle with a much larger foe that was also Venice’s major overseas market. Even so, Venice tenaciously defended its traditional model, using its naval power and heavily fortified overseas possessions to direct trade to its privileged capital and to protect its merchant marine, which was preferably engaged in intensive peaceful trade with the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, trade in the capital remained subject to an explicit regime of preferential access to Venetian citizens and a whole battery of rules carefully regulating both commerce and the diverse groups who came to Venice in pursuit of it. Venetian historiography stresses that, amid its gradual relative decline, Venice glorified itself in myth, architecture, and pageant. It engaged in occasional bouts of reforming zeal before settling into a watchful neutrality sustained by a superb diplomatic and intelligence apparatus.17 Tuscany’s late and comparatively brief engagement with Venice’s traditional domains differed markedly. The newly rebuilt free port of Livorno, with its comparatively liberal regime of religious toleration,

INTRODUCTION

open trade, and low taxes, stood in sharp contrast to Venice.18 Lacking an established domestic merchant marine or a port that required politically directed traffic, Tuscany had no need to incur the expense of escorting its merchant fleet or of acquiring and defending overseas ports. Free from the threat of retaliation, Tuscany could unleash its fleet for offensive operations. Likewise, unconstrained by deeply entrenched commercial ties, Tuscany could negotiate both with the Ottomans and with their many enemies for advantageous terms. Uninterested in territory, Tuscany could build trust with local actors suspicious of European motivations. Free from the need to defend an unpopular Catholic hierarchy ruling over a majority non-Catholic population, Tuscany could proclaim itself as both a protector of Catholics and a defender of anti-Ottoman interests be they Maronite, Druze, Shia, Sunni, or Orthodox. That is, Tuscany could be both more ostentatiously and aggressively Catholic than Venice, yet also more credible with rebels suspicious of Venice’s territorial interests and commercial ties to the Ottomans. As with Tuscany’s other projects for overseas engagement, this was both an unusually innovative approach and not wholly successful. Unlike with Tuscany’s other projects, Tuscany’s problem lay less with the intransigence of Tuscany’s would-be collaborators than with the military defeat of Tuscany’s ally in a major, multiday battle with the Ottoman imperial army.

On Empire As with other essential terms, the “age of empire” in the title requires some explanation. Although some early modern states were regularly called empires at the time—the Tuscans referred to the Ottoman Empire by that title, for instance—my use of the term is a conventional analytical choice.19 In political terms, I take empire to be a relatively territorially extensive and powerful polity that frequently privileges a central territory or group, which often rules over diverse subjects. 20 Linguistic, religious, and ethnic difference are fragile bases for definition, however, not least since empires often generate a measure of unity among previously diverse peoples. Similar problems obtain with the issue of scale. Venice is conventionally regarded as an empire, yet its domains, however geographically dispersed and ethnically and religiously diverse,

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were never especially populous nor did their aggregate land area constitute an impressive total.21 A much larger state, like Renaissance France, is rarely regarded as an empire, but the contemporary Holy Roman Empire is, albeit of a peculiar kind.22 The slipperiness of political empire does not end with issues of scale, structure, and identity, for questions of boundaries are not easily resolved. Empires often exert influence beyond their frontiers, yet their claims to control within their nominal borders also frequently stretch beyond their effective grasp. Self-definition is no more reliable. It is a commonplace that Americans usually do not see themselves as belonging to an empire, a view regularly contested elsewhere. In contrast, for legal, religious, and political reasons, Henry VIII’s parliament insisted in the Act in Restraint of Appeals that England was an empire long before it met modern historians’ definition of one. 23 Although one could easily multiply exceptions and objections, the idea of empire remains a powerful analytical tool. Indeed, so potent is the idea that it has been readily extended from its original political significance to cover many other instances that combine the ideas of power, extensiveness, and a central organizing point. One need only think of the world of money where banking, business, commercial, economic, financial, and property empires have widely understood, albeit imprecise, meanings. If empire is a slippery, but useful term as both an actors’ and analytical category, the notion of an age of empires is equally fraught. Empires are an exceptionally old and widespread form of political organization, so there have been many ages of empires, from deep antiquity to the early twentieth century.24 The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, have a particularly strong claim to be an age of empires. The case is perhaps historiographically clearest in Eurasia, where it is conventional to see the five large early modern states—Ming China, Mughal India, Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Muscovy—as successors, if sometimes indirectly and with complications, of the Mongol and Timurid Empires and their devolved components.25 Within this group, there is a strong historiographic tradition of seeing the Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans as early modern Islamic Empires, though the religious framing can obscure the fact that all three ruled over large numbers of non-Muslim subjects.26 While it has recently been argued that Ming China should be seen as a Great State, it remains historio-

INTRODUCTION

graphically conventional to speak of Imperial China; and early modern China’s vast scope, system of rule, and sense of its centrality certainly fit the imperial model neatly enough.27 As to Russia, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Muscovy became an exceptionally extensive state, one that kept growing as Imperial Russia through to the twentieth century; from 1613, under the Romanovs, the empire grew at an average of fifty-five square miles per day.28 Turning to Europe, “the Empire” and “the Emperor” traditionally referred to the Holy Roman Empire and its ruler.29 The historiographic convention has been to treat the Atlantic European overseas possessions as empires even at the risk of eliding important differences in scale and political structure. Whether or not this is wholly satisfactory, it is thus customary to see the Spanish and Portuguese empires as paving the way for the Dutch, English (later British), and French ones. 30 The case of Spain is clearest, for even if King Philip II’s disparate possessions in Europe were merely a very extensive composite monarchy, his possessions in the Americas included lands conquered from the Triple Alliance in Mesoamerica and the Inka Tawantinsuyu in Peru; it has long been customary to refer to these polities as the Aztec / Mexica and Inka empires, respectively. 31 Iberian empire could interact in complex ways with existing empires. The defeat of the Portuguese and the death of their King Sebastian I at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir (Al-Ksar al-Kabir) in Morocco in 1578 set off a succession crisis in Portugal that culminated in the Iberian Union (1580) in which Philip II of Spain became Philip I of Portugal. 32 Ahmad al-Mansur’s greatly strengthened Moroccan regime struck south across the Sahara in 1591 and toppled the Songhai Empire. 33 Morocco’s expansion at the expense of older empires was paralleled by the crippling blow dealt to the Vijayanagara Empire by the Deccan Sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda, and Bidar at the Battle of Talikota (1565). 34 The Ethiopian Empire likewise faced military threats from expanding Muslim polities but successfully navigated the challenges, helped by timely Portuguese assistance to victory in 1543. 35 As Tuscany turned to the wider world, it confronted a political environment filled with both rising and falling empires. That it did so while nominally within the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire while in fact

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confronting a profusion of smaller polities in northern and central Italy both within and beyond the boundaries of the Empire—the Republics of Lucca, Genoa, and Venice; the Papal States; the Spanish-ruled Duchy of Milan; and the Duchies of Savoy, Urbino, Ferrara (to 1597; then Modena and Reggio), Mantua, and Parma; and a multitude of micropolities— serves as a reminder that this age of empire was also an era of regional states.36 This study takes empire’s ambiguity and multiple valences as an opportunity for productively exploring the functions, purposes, and boundaries of the geographically extensive polities that mushroomed in the early modern period. Tuscany’s position as a creative small power renders it a particularly compelling vantage point for examining the complex and reciprocal relationships between a state that was not an empire and those that were. In light of the centrality to this story of the Tuscan state and its rulers, servants, and subjects, a brief account of the dramatic changes that swept Tuscany in the sixteenth century is in order.

A Medici Monarchy in Tuscany The existence of a principality ruled by the Medici dynasty in Tuscany was a byproduct of the sometimes fraught relationship between the Spanish and the papacy in the tumultuous years of the Italian Wars (1494–1530 or 1559). Expelled in 1494 and 1527, the Medici had required massive Spanish military intervention to emerge as Florentine princes. Two Medici popes, Leo X (r. 1513–1521) and Clement VII (r. 1523–1534), used the considerable powers of their office to secure their house’s position in Florence over the objections of powerful republican opposition. The final suppression of the republicans in the devastating siege of 1529–1530, conducted by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s (1500–1558) forces, bound the Medici and Spanish Habsburgs by ties of mutual dependence. In the early years, this dependence was largely that of a satellite regime on its mighty protector to ensure its survival against a conquered people. The Medici regime and Florentine independence seemed precarious, as underlined by Charles V’s acquisition of Milan in 1535. Florence teetered on the brink of a Spanish annexation with the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici (1510–1537) in 1537 before the tenuous installation of the scion of a cadet line of the Medici, the seventeen-year-old Cosimo de’ Medici. 37

INTRODUCTION

The fall of the Florentine republic in 1530 famously marked the collapse of an illustrious republican tradition. On its ashes rose a stable Medici monarchy, a transition traditionally regarded as the end of Florence’s golden age by dismayed Anglophone historians. The dark portrait has undoubted merits. Regional consolidation had been costly. A series of wars, revolutions, and revolts saw Prato sacked and Pisa, Florence, and Siena successfully besieged and captured between 1509 and 1555. From this violence, a centralized autocratic state emerged, snuffing out centuries of republicanism. Seen from the perspective of Florence’s economy, international standing, and internal peace, however, the replacement of an unstable republic in hostile rivalry with Siena and exercising lordly dominion over sometimes seething subject cities—such as Arezzo, Volterra, or Pisa—with a remarkably stable regional monarchy offered significant advantages. The advantages could only be secured, however, if Tuscans could bear the costs and maintain their independence. For decades, this seemed a doubtful prospect. Cosimo I’s critical insight, however, was to appreciate that the mutuality of Spanish-Medici dependence could be turned to his advantage. The extensive bloodshed that resulted from installing the Medici and the reliance on Imperial garrisons gave the Spanish Habsburgs few friends in Tuscany. Short of direct annexation—a policy that, for reasons of legitimacy, public image, and expense, was ultimately unattractive—the Medici offered the best prospects of a stable regime that could make a net contribution to the Imperial cause. Domestically, Cosimo I created a space between the poles of Francophile republicanism and Spanish rule that proved acceptable to the bulk of the politically active populace. To a country scarred by war and social and political turmoil, he offered stability, the eventual withdrawal of foreign troops, and an independent regime that could turn patricians into aristocratic courtiers while excluding Savonarolan piagnoni and die-hard republicans. Mixing threat and incentive, Cosimo could portray all this as the best that could be achieved against an Imperial party suspicious of republicanism and itching for a more repressive, autocratic option. To the Imperial party, Cosimo could act as a bulwark of stability against religious and political radicalism and Francophile republicanism. More than this, Cosimo I could offer an ever-more impecunious Emperor the option of replacing an expensive military occupation with net

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contributions by an ever-faithful ally bound by dynastic marriage ties. Through patient state-building and occasional boldness in pushing the boundaries of acceptable action, Cosimo I transformed the Spanish satellite Duchy of Florence into the Spanish ally Grand Duchy of Tuscany. With the strong support of his powerful Spanish-Imperial allies, Cosimo I’s regime defeated exile armies in 1537 and 1554 and acquired most of the territory of Siena (1554–1557) after a brutal siege of the city (1554–1555). 38 With the conquest of Siena, the Medici both completed their substantive expansion in Tuscany and secured an unassailable position as Florence’s hereditary princes. Buoyed by Florence’s robust recovery and a peace dividend, the Medici could afford to turn outward in a way that no regime in Florence had been able to do for generations. Flush with the success of unifying most of Tuscany as an absolutist, bureaucratic, and centralized polity at peace with its immediate neighbors, the Medici could devote considerable resources to foreign adventures. The heavy fortification of Tuscany—it has been likened to Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s (1633–1707) later defenses of France—Medici alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs, and the stability of the regime’s political position meant that force could be used overseas with relative impunity. 39 A few words on names may be in order. As the foregoing sketch indicates, Florence and the other polities of Tuscany underwent repeated political changes in the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the century, four republics and a small lordship ruled the ancient historic region of Tuscany. The largest among them was the Florentine Republic, then in the midst of a bitter war with the rebel Republic of Pisa, which it would finally conquer in 1509. The Republics of Siena and Lucca and the much smaller Lordship of Piombino all retained their independence, ever wary of Florence’s ambitions. By 1557, the Medici had long since effectively transformed the old Republic of Florence into a hereditary duchy. To this, they had added control of the Republic of Siena, except for key coastal territories, mostly from the old Republic of Siena, which the Spanish retained as the Presidial (from presidio or fortress) States.40 In 1569, Pope Pius V granted Cosimo I the novel title of Grand Duke of Tuscany, thereby transforming the remnants of these rival republics into the new Grand Duchy of Tuscany.41

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At no point, however, did the Medici realize their ambition to control all of Tuscany, for the Republic of Lucca successfully defended its independence against all comers until 1799. Thus, when I use “Tuscany” and “Tuscans” throughout this book, I generally deploy these words in a political sense, as shorthand for the Medici monarchy that became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and that state’s subjects and representatives. The intrinsically ambiguous relationship between these political terms and the larger historic cultural region of Tuscany is productive, however, in that it points to how early modern Tuscans used history for political ends. Although the Medici never made good their political claim to all of Tuscany, in good Renaissance fashion they unabashedly appropriated the heritage of Etruria and the Etruscans as the truly ancient historical basis for their new state.42 As untroubled by a need for a singular, consistent basis for their rule as most Renaissance princes, the Medici also merrily appropriated Roman, medieval, Renaissance, religious, and mythic bases for legitimacy when it suited them.43 Above all, however, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany grew out of the old Florentine Republic. The grand dukes promoted other cities in Tuscany, including, notably, Pisa and Livorno, but Florence retained a clear primacy. As a result, it remained fairly common to refer to Florence, Florentines, and the duke of Florence as if the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had not supplanted its more famous republican predecessor. In some settings, there were power dynamics and claims to status and legitimacy associated with the use of one term or the other, but equally the choice could be a matter of casual usage. Generally, I have sought to limit the usage of Florence and Florentines to the specific case of the city and its citizens and to use Tuscany and Tuscans for the state and its citizens, but I have also followed the sources in their usage of the terms. In any event, ambiguity on this score dates to the late sixteenth century itself, reflecting unresolved questions about the relationship between Tuscany, its dominant city, and the legacy of the old republic.

Florence’s Historians and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany Crossing the boundaries of numerous specialties, this study covers a period of Tuscan history that had once been neglected but is now flourishing. For nearly half a century from the end of the Second World War,

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Renaissance Florence constituted a major locus of Anglophone scholarship.44 This was overwhelmingly the Florence of the republic, especially that of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Animated by a belief in Florence as the torchbearer of civic republicanism, capitalism, and the cultural efflorescence that emerged from the flourishing of competitive individualism, Anglophone scholars working in the context of the Cold War characterized Florence from Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) as experiencing a Golden Age critical for the advancement of Western Civilization. Inspired by Jacob Burckhardt’s notions of both the state and the individual as works of art and Hans Baron’s thesis about the relationship between Florence’s beginning of the fifteenth century military crisis and civic humanism , to the postwar generation of Anglophone historians, Florence’s role as the birthplace of the Renaissance and as restorer of classical republican political traditions seemed naturally convergent.45 Several acknowledged tensions lay at the heart of this story, however, for scholars also appreciated the failings of Florence’s republic. Above all, they had to wrestle with the role of Florence’s most famous family, the Medici, who worked diligently to subvert republican institutions even as they lavishly patronized the Renaissance.46 Mounting evidence of the practical functioning of the Florentine state and an emerging left politics in the 1970s and 1980s that focused on class conflict presented an altogether less sunny image. In this story, Florence’s social history meshed with its political history to cast Florence as a society beset by struggle, culminating in the tragic victory of the Medici.47 The end of the Cold War and its ideological battles and the broadening of the narrative of the Renaissance beyond Florence opened historiographic space for new questions but also reduced the automatic centrality of Florence. Comparing Florence with other polities and seeing it in a longer time horizon showed the complex dynamism of other states in Tuscany, Florence’s relationship to the broader story of the rise and fall of the communes, and the key role of the lordships of central and northern Italy in the Renaissance.48 Even as the story of the Renaissance has broadened, Florence has retained its claim to a special role on several grounds. Most of them—for instance, those pertaining to art history—are beyond the scope of this study, but a few bear mentioning here. For one, Florence has retained

INTRODUCTION

a very large number of public and private records. Exceptionally, Florentines generated both extraordinary family records, especially the ricordanze and accounts books of the patriciate, and detailed, albeit problematic, tax records from the first catasto of 1427 onward. These have enabled the writing of very detailed family, neighborhood, and social histories that have few parallels elsewhere.49 In light of Florentine families’ critical role in the history of banking, finance, and the rise of capitalism, there has been a confluence of family and business studies, which often sit at the base of larger studies of Florence’s economy. 50 Likewise, the torrent of writing about the tortuous and ultimately unsuccessful politics of the Florentine republic has given Florence an enduring place in the history of political thought, culminating in Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540). As a result, an understanding of the precise details of late republican Florentine politics is essential and has fueled continual inquiry.51 These studies share a tacit endpoint with the fall of the last republic in 1530 or the rise of the Grand Duchy, as, for instance, in John Najemy’s now standard A History of Florence: 1200–1575.52 Even as the traditional fields of Florentine history have seen a relative decline in recent decades, Medici Tuscany in the reigns of Cosimo I, Francesco I, and Ferdinando I has been the subject of increasingly intensive scholarship. Of course, new interest among Anglophone scholars has not marked the beginning of grand ducal historiography—far from it. An illustrious Italian tradition of writing on this period stretches from the work of Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi (1739–1801) through Luciano Berti’s study of Francesco I to the three-volume history of the Grand Duchy by Furio Diaz. 53 Even so, Anglophone interest has been helped by early ducal Tuscany’s dynamism, the abundance and accessibility of sources held at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, and the relative neglect of the period by previous generations, which had prompted Eric Cochrane to write his seminal Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800. 54 This book is written in that broader historiographic framework, situating Tuscany’s global actions in the context of an abundance of recent research on the Grand Duchy, particularly the period known in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze as the Mediceo del Principato (1537–1743).55 The contours of scholarship on the grand ducal Medici differ markedly from the more familiar works on the fifteenth and early sixteenth

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centuries. Politically, interest has concentrated on the Medici project of successfully co-opting both the previously rival cities of Tuscany and the Florentine political elite into an autocratic political system. This developed into a prototypical absolutist, bureaucratic, and centralized state epitomized by the construction of the Uffizi (offices, in Tuscan dialect). 56 In a region traditionally contested by rival republics riven by internal strife, such a new monarchy required an accompanying cultural and religious framework of legitimation, as has been explored in several recent studies. 57 Autocratic centralization not only transformed Tuscany’s political history but also gave scope for new, large-scale development projects that challenged the traditional urban hierarchy and political economy of Tuscany. The Medici attempted this most successfully in the newly redeveloped city of Livorno, which grew spectacularly as a result of the development of the physical and especially legal infrastructure that turned it into a pioneering free port. Recent studies by Francesca Trivellato, on communitarian cosmopolitanism, and Corey Tazzara, on the development of the free port, have shown how the conjuncture of economic growth and relative religious tolerance transformed Livorno into a dynamic cosmopolitan center and hub of the Sephardic diaspora. 58 Even as Livorno grew into a major nexus of peaceful trade, the centralized regime that built it also developed it as the operational base both of the Tuscan navy and of the separate naval military order of the Knights of Santo Stefano. Throughout the period considered in this book, the Medici grand dukes strained to transform Tuscany into a remarkably active naval power. To this end, the Medici regime hosted northern Europeans in Livorno, facilitating their epochal commercial and piratical entry into the Mediterranean as a whole. 59 In so doing, the grand dukes sought to move beyond the fifteenth-century galley system of the Florentine republic to tap the deeper legacy of Pisa as one of the great medieval maritime republics and to play an active role in Spanish-led naval coalitions in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.60 In light of the tremendous scale of the surviving documentation, range of Medici actions, and depth of the historiography, this study seeks not to be comprehensive but rather to play the role of a puzzle piece crafted to slot together with exciting work occurring on many fronts, especially among a new generation of Italian scholars. For instance,

INTRODUCTION

Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco’s recent dissertation undertakes a thorough and systematic comparison of Tuscan and Genoese efforts to enter world trade, primarily focused on the seventeenth century.61 New dissertation projects ongoing at the University of Padua and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa consider Tuscany’s sugar trade and Ferdinando I’s ventures in Morocco.62 The role of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Florentine merchants in early Iberian trade and exploration, with particular attention to the Florentine community in Lisbon, has been the subject of a series of studies, many displaying remarkable archival virtuosity.63 In keeping with a broader historiographical interest in reassessing early modern projects for intellectual engagement with the Islamic world—principally the Ottoman and Safavid Empires—the last decade has seen research on the Tuscan-Papal Medici Oriental Press and the work of Giovanni Battista Raimondi (1536–1614).64 Likewise, exhibitions on Tuscany’s ties to Russia and on the operation of the Medici Oriental Press have produced important companion volumes, which have proved invaluable.65 I draw on these studies without seeking to reproduce them. Similarly, I briefly summarize the findings of Hair and Davies on Tuscany in Sierra Leone and of Kaled El Bibas on Tuscany’s relationship with the Lebanese emir Fakhr ad-Dīn; I have also benefited from the latter’s work on Tuscany’s interaction with Morocco.66 The present study seeks to embed these discrete episodes in a broader framework that captures the range of Tuscan activity and the political logic that bound its multifarious enterprises together. In parallel with the transformation in historians’ approach to the period, art historians have directed our attention to a broader vision of material culture and new conceptions of collecting, influence, and imagination that engage with Renaissance Italy’s long-distance connections.67 To their careful reconstructions and analyses both of the Grand Duchy’s collections and of the products of the Medici workshops, the present study adds the broader political framework through which objects and information could move to and from Tuscany.68 It explores the general patterns of action that gave the Medici access to objects from around the world, specific instances when Medici agents sent items to Florence, and times when the Medici dispatched luxury goods as diplomatic gifts. Central to Grand Ducal Tuscany’s historiographic rehabilitation has been a deepening appreciation of its pioneering role in the history

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of science, not only as patron of Galileo, but also as a center of botanical inquiry. The network of Medici agents, affiliates, and diplomats who sent samples to Tuscany’s new botanical gardens, there to be depicted by talented artists, also brought the rare and exotic items that filled Medici collections and supplied Grand Ducal workshops. This book seeks to elucidate some of the social, political, and diplomatic structures that enabled exotic flora and fauna, luxury goods, and information to come to Tuscany. The institutions that were developed to house and analyze them, from the botanical gardens and villas to the collections of the Guardaroba, are considered primarily in so far as they pertain to Tuscany’s long-distance activities and their diplomatic and political dimensions.69 Just as the need to constrain the scope of this study thematically requires the imposition of artificial subject boundaries, so also this book wrestles with the same logistical challenges that face any individual’s attempt to write global history. Research for this volume rests primarily on Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English manuscripts, with small amounts of German, French, and Latin in other sources. The Medici, however, had to contend with a much wider variety of languages in their global projects. Even in the Medici archives, I have relied on the accompanying early modern translations of diplomatic documents in languages like Arabic and Russian. The Medici addressed this same problem of language by commissioning their polyglot dragoman-diplomat, Michelangelo Corai, to negotiate on their behalf in Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and by patronizing the Tipografia Medicea Orientale (Medici Oriental Press). Language and logistical constraints—Tuscany’s most important rebel ally was based in Aleppo, which has been shattered by rebellion and defeat again so recently—mean that this is a project told largely from the point of the view of the Tuscan state and its archives, with all that that entails. Fortunately, at least, the Tuscan side of this story has become vastly more accessible thanks to the Medici Archive Project and its BIA database, which renders visible much that would otherwise be obscured by the vast scale of the Medici archives.70

On Global History Globalization comes in waves. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury globalization went hand in glove with expanding European,

INTRODUCTION

North American, and Japanese empires, both formal and informal. The current period of globalization, by contrast, gathered momentum amid a wave of decolonization and took off dramatically in an era of political fragmentation and the apparent dominance of the private economy and information networks.71 Historians’ accounts of subjects that would now be classified as global history have thus far mirrored broader trends and can be expected to continue to do so. From the stories of colonization and decolonization, through Marxist-infused economic analyses, to a dawning awareness of environmental change, global histories have now been extended to cover nearly every subject that historians investigate.72 After apparently sweeping all before it, global history has, however, faced a new wave of critiques.73 Amid all this historiographic energy, a few major trends in early modern global historiography bear particular mention here: nationalism and multiculturalism; collecting; commodities, trade patterns, and the groups involved; seas and the diasporas that span them; and comparative and connective history. In telling the story of Tuscany’s engagement with the wider world, this study does not seek to contribute to tacitly nationalist narratives that tally the exploits of famous Italian travelers; indeed, it is meant to challenge implicitly national frameworks.74 In this, it leans against an old tradition in Italian scholarship that sees two accomplished Florentine travelers who play an important role in this book, Filippo Sassetti (1540–1588) and Francesco Carletti (1573 / 1574–1636), as exemplars of Italian travel in a line stretching back through Amerigo Vespucci to Marco Polo.75 The story of a third equally important Medici affiliate offers a useful corrective. Michelangelo Corai—a renegade Syrian dragoman, Mantuan knight, Tuscan diplomat, Persian mining commissioner, and spy—plays a central role in part 3 herein and certainly cannot be easily fit into any national narrative.76 While the case of Corai challenges nationalist narratives, it is also not an especially close fit for the last generation’s reveling in ambiguous, multiple, and unresolved identities as precursors of modern multiculturalism.77 Corai crossed more frontiers and negotiated more difficult circumstances, sometimes at excruciating personal cost, than most anyone, but he was nothing if not committed to his mission; embracing a more flexible identity would have saved him a great deal of suffering, but like Carletti, he did so only

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briefly and instrumentally. As we shall see, truly ambiguous agents, like Anthony Sherley, came to grief. In a religiously militant age punctuated by many long, bloody wars, sloughing off identities was costly, especially if done more than once. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany participated enthusiastically in efforts to collect rare and exotic items from around the world. Standing at the intersection of text and object, collecting fits well with existing structures of knowledge and methods of research in multiple disciplines and has been the subject of intensive inquiry. Recent studies have considered things in motion and the various shades of meaning they assumed as they were swept around the world, generally taking the object or the specific courtly or institutional collection as their point of analysis.78 For the Medici, the meanings attached to these objects were profoundly inflected both by expert opinion and considerations of their political utility in display and gift giving. Although the Medici certainly held onto some items tenaciously, much of their collection of exotica was, at least in potential, constantly available for circulation to other courts. Thus, collecting is both an essential framework for analysis and also a static snapshot of an ever-changing body of materials embedded in mobile networks of exchange. With the rise of an increasingly integrated global economy and the decline of empire, the economic side of global history has moved to center stage. Commodities, prominent high-value trades—especially in spices, stimulant foods, dyes, and textiles—and the relative power of various groups in Indian Ocean and Asian trade have all received a great deal of attention of late.79 This study draws on this valuable research but also points to its limitations. Focusing on long-term structures and patterns, economic approaches sometimes downplay the importance of politics and the specific moment. Something similar might be said for the important wave of studies of seas and the diasporas that span them, which have productively challenged national histories but sometimes understated the still important role of the state and nationality in constraining access.80 By considering a polity whose interests flitted across all the major trades and oceans, this study brings together the many objects of global history with attention to the political basis for their acquisition, use, and trade. In that way, this book is closer to studies of specific cities and their relationship to commerce and the wider world.81

INTRODUCTION

In parallel with the economic arguments, historians have sought to trace the origins of the political and military divergences that yawned so widely in the nineteenth century by undertaking large-scale comparative investigations. These have, of necessity, sought to advance structuralist or technological explanations based on a mechanism of action, like competitive state systems or the role of the steppe frontier or engagement with gunpowder weaponry, to explain the rise of European states and their formidable militaries.82 This book makes no claim to a grand theory of history, but it does offer evidence to challenge simple binary comparisons—northwest Europe and China are favorites—and the putatively dominant role of economic institutions or particular geographical features in explaining how the early modern world developed.83 While I draw on the grand syntheses, this book builds on connected histories, which have sought to trace the movement of individuals and ideas across the early modern world.84 Whereas comparative history has flourished in studies of Europe and China, connected history has concentrated on the longer, deeper, and more fragmentary relationship between Europe and India in the early modern period. The richness of the ties has permitted subtle studies both of India itself and the various iterations of the idea of India for Europeans.85 Prominent and articulate Tuscan travelers like Sassetti and Carletti regularly appear in cameo roles in these larger accounts of early modern Europe’s intellectual engagement with the wider world.86 Since the Medici and their affiliates played an important role in European botany and medicine’s early efforts to come to terms with the massive wave of information generated by the first global age, this study benefits from the tremendous growth of research in the early modern global history of science.87 Even so, this study focuses on the role of the Tuscan state in fostering research, collecting samples, commissioning related work, and moving materials through diplomatic networks, rather than on the content of scientific inquiries. Medici affiliates interacted with a remarkably wide array of places, frequently commenting on and occasionally participating in local politics along the way. To make sense of this, for places like Muscovy, Japan, and Southeast Asia, where Tuscany’s interactions were relatively few, I depend on a small set of standard scholarly surveys for reference.88

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Though I draw on a broader array of specialist studies, particularly related to the Jesuits, mapping, and the patterns of global trade, in the consideration of Tuscan activities in Colonial Latin America, China, and India, here too I rely on recent synthetic scholarly volumes.89 This creates an immediate imbalance in perspective between a precise historiographic consideration of early modern Europe in general and Renaissance Italy in particular and the much broader brushstrokes of my engagement with Ming China or Mughal India. To stretch a metaphor, it is a historiographic contrast between pointillist precision and an impressionist’s rapid painting. This reflects the limitations of my own knowledge rather than the underlying historiography. Between these poles, I have delved somewhat more deeply into the historiography of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires in recognition of the depth and scale of Tuscan involvement in seeking to ally with the latter to destroy the former. Within the broad expanses of Ottoman historiography, I have concentrated on the Ottomans in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, the classical empire’s structure, and the imperial crises that beset and transformed the empire at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Tuscany certainly contributed to exacerbating these latter, stretching its military and diplomatic resources in support of Ottoman rebels and the Safavids in the hopes of shattering the Ottoman Empire. The Tuscans did not, of course, succeed, but the Ottoman Empire did structurally transform in ways that are consistent with Tuscany’s perception that local notables with regional power bases would drain de facto power from the center.90 The Tuscans were similarly perceptive in appreciating that Shah ‘Abbas I’s reformist dynamism, force of personality, and strategic acumen unlocked possibilities unavailable to his predecessors (or successors, for that matter). Tuscan optimism that ‘Abbas might break through to the Mediterranean, through his alliance with Ottoman rebels along a crescent running from Iraq to Lebanon, was not ill-founded. As we shall see, only the result of a three-day battle between the Ottoman rebels in Syria and the main Ottoman imperial army under the personal command of the grand vizier prevented Tuscany’s desired outcome. Safavid historiography has wrestled with the seriousness of ‘Abbas’s European allies, the complications associated with his diplomatic practices, and the structural factors motivating and constraining European engagement.

INTRODUCTION

The present study suggests that the Tuscans were actually quite well-informed about the Safavids, that they were in deadly earnest about their alliance, and that the plans for a Tuscan-Ottoman rebel-Safavid alliance were well considered and nearly successful. The alliance rested less on the commercial interests of the silk trade that ran from Iran through Aleppo to Europe, as has been traditionally stressed, than on a confluence of strategic and religious interests in expelling the Ottoman imperial administration from the Levant.91

Engaging with the Atlantic Empires Tuscany’s most important relationship, however, always remained that with the Spanish Habsburgs. Under Philip II (1527–1598) and Philip III (1578–1621), the Spanish Habsburgs not only dominated the Italian peninsula but also retained a huge lead over other European powers in long-distance trade and empire, even as their monopoly position eroded under Philip III. As a result, Tuscany’s prospects for participating in overseas trade and empire depended to a large degree on the Spanish Habsburgs. Spanish imperial historiography is traditionally quite introspective, telling a national story of rise and fall. Political historical debates have concentrated on issues of frontiers, resistance to a unified Castilian-dominated empire, the hardening of boundaries and attitudes to Islam and Judaism, the extent of Spanish domination in Italy, and the reasons for Spain’s slow defeat in the Eighty Years’ War in Flanders.92 Attention has concentrated on the person of Philip II and whether the set of choices he made led to Spanish decline, especially with respect to northwest Europe.93 Perhaps naturally, Anglophone comparative political scholarship has also focused on northwest Europe, especially England and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch Republic and France.94 Global Spanish imperial historiography has lately also considered connections with Asia, principally through the Philippines and the Manila Galleon.95 Though traditionally marginal in Spanish imperial historiography, Tuscans both contributed to and experienced shifts in Iberian policy quite forcefully. The connections extended from tangible Tuscan contributions to Spanish coffers and fleets and private trade on the Manila Galleon to the establishment of a large Sephardic community in

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Livorno and the arrival of the Florentine Codex, to say nothing of the direct Spanish role in installing the Medici. Fortunately, a vein of historiography on the Iberian empires has turned to considering the role of non-Iberians. Building on arguments advanced in a debate over the decline of Spain in Past and Present a quarter century before,96 Henry Kamen has offered a significant reinterpretation of Spanish imperial history in Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763.97 Separating the story of imperial rise and fall from that of the underlying society and economy, Kamen argued that what grew and fell was the Spanish imperial system and that this system depended essentially on people from outside the Iberian peninsula, especially Italians.98 The Grand Duchy of Tuscany’s experience within the Spanish imperial system was complex and evolved with shifting political circumstances and power dynamics. In the reign of Francesco I, Tuscany sought to leverage its naval alliance and robust financial support for the Spanish Habsburgs into a partnership. Though the relationship would cool under Ferdinando I, especially in the 1590s with the turn to France, Tuscany continued to return to the idea of joining the Iberian imperial project. Its efforts deepened with the Spanish Habsburg acquisition of the Portuguese Empire in 1580, which had been supported by Tuscan financing for the invasion. The Portuguese system of administration—with its auctions of monopoly contracts and its relative openness to foreign investment in imperial rights—and Tuscany’s close relationship with the Spanish Habsburgs seemed to offer tantalizing possibilities, yet the political barriers to Tuscan state participation could not ultimately be surmounted.99 Stymied by Iberian intransigence over their monopoly position, the Tuscans explored working closely with the Dutch and English as partners in their projects of global trade and empire. Although the final results were modest, the implications of Tuscany’s early engagement with these protagonists of the seventeenth century story are not. Tuscany’s intimate knowledge of Dutch and English maritime affairs, its close collaboration with communities of Dutch and English mariners, its large stock of investment capital, and its deep wells of financial and commercial expertise made such collaboration not only feasible but mutually attractive. Contrary to standard assumptions about the role of information, institutions, initiative, or other endogenous explana-

INTRODUCTION

tions for northern European success, Tuscany’s ultimate inability to fully capitalize on the possibilities of global trade and empire rested on political considerations. These included not only Tuscany’s unwillingness to undertake a course of action that would lead to war with the Spanish, but also less-well-known Dutch efforts to block Tuscany’s global trade ambitions from disrupting Dutch monopoly pretensions. The successful violence of mercantilist empires seeking monopoly, even those possessing some modernizing capitalist characteristics like the Dutch and English East India companies, more than the superiority of commercial institutions or technology, is sufficient to account for the differential outcome.100

On Protagonists and Heroes The Grand Duchy of Tuscany justified its bellicosity by frequent recourse to a discourse that denounced Ottoman tyranny. The Tuscans certainly seemed to have believed the Ottomans to be tyrannical, thereby participating in a long-standing interpretative framework.101 The Medici claim to resist tyranny, however, sat awkwardly with their pioneering absolutist monarchy, let alone Tuscany’s alliance with the Spanish Empire, then in the process of acquiring the reputation that became the Black Legend, and the papacy, then overseeing various inquisitions and the Index of Prohibited Books. Medici Tuscany was, after all, a model autocratic state built on the ashes of Renaissance Tuscany’s famous republics. As Robert Dallington put it in his assessment of Tuscany in 1596, there were more than three hundred ruinous and obsolete old fortifications, “By which number may very probably bee coniectured their many and divers States in this small circuite in former times: for as it appeareth by Historie, not onely Florence, Siena, and Pisa (which of late yeares were reduced into one Government) but also Pistoia, Arezzo, Volterra, and almost all the Cities now under the great duke, had every one their severall and distinct State. Whereupon it was necessarie, each State should have her Castles and Fortes to affront those that confined upon them.”102 This new Medici state had inherited and extended the Republic of Florence’s project of absorbing Tuscany’s other polities. With centuries of rivalry leaving a rich legacy of victories, defeats, betrayals, and triumphs, holding this state together presented

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serious problems. Although the Medici were ultimately quite successful with co-optation and other noncoercive tactics, Tuscany at the outset was held in military subjection reinforced by Medici citadels in Tuscany’s major cities. Dallington vividly described the purposes of the guns in the citadels “as to keepe in awful termes the Cities themselves”; the grand duke’s cannons were there to fire on rebels in the city.103 So intimidating were they that they contributed to Tuscany’s transformation from one of Europe’s most politically volatile regions to one of its most placid. They did so not by shelling Tuscany’s rebel republicans into submission, but instead by deterring organized resistance to Tuscany’s sociopolitical transformation into a hierarchical hereditary monarchy. Even within the framework of a society that accepted monarchy, the grand duke’s claims to resist tyranny conflicted with the enthusiastic Medici embrace of Mediterranean galley slavery. As we shall see, the grand duke of Tuscany actively promoted his leading role in captive-taking as an indication of the potency of his military forces and the success of his campaign to harm the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, even Francesco Carletti’s ringing denunciation of slavery and manumission of his own slaves came after he had participated in the Atlantic slave trade.104 Although some of the figures who appear here, including especia