Steve Reads

Something very peculiar happened at the turn of the 15th century: Italians started viewing the Roman Empire in a much different light than their ancestors had. Dante, you’ll remember, stuck Caesar’s assassins — Cassius and Brutus — alongside Judas Iscariot at the very deepest circle of hell, each stuffed into one of Satan’s mouths and being eternally digested. A modern reader of Dante might wonder what all the fuss was about: sure, killing Caesar was a bad thing, but was it really that bad?

Hans Baron explains: much of medieval theology, more or less ending with Dante, saw Caesar’s creation of the Roman Empire as God’s plan for human salvation. Just as Christ would claim dominion over all of mankind, so the Romans would create a universal kingdom with Caesar at the helm.

As the 15th century turned, this started to change. It began with a slow movement away from the monastic ideal that had dominated centuries of Christian thought. The new view said that the active, engaged citizen should be a society’s ideal — that it should celebrate the active life rather than the contemplative life. With this change came a new view of Caesar: he was no longer the benevolent dictator heralding Christ’s eternal reign on earth; instead he destroyed the government that had given the Roman people their vital energy.

Why this change? Baron believes — and argues with great care — that Florentines accelerated their changing view of society under the threat of invasion from Milan. A Milanese tyrant named Giangaleazzo Visconti had taken over nearly all of northern and central Italy, leaving Florence alone to defend the cause of liberty in the middle of the country. When all hope appeared to be lost, and even Florence itself seemed like it would fall under Giangaleazzo’s control, the man died in one of Europe’s periodic disease epidemics. His sudden death led to the collapse of all his conquests. For at least a century thereafter, Florentines defined themselves as the solitary defenders of liberty, even in the face of Italian cowardice.

Baron makes a convincing case that the Giangaleazzo episode was central to much Florentine political thought that came after. Writers before Baron had apparently left unexplained why several prominent Florentine writers suddenly changed their tunes around 1400, switching from a defense of tyranny to a rousing defense of political liberty. Some Florentine books switch from pro-tyranny to pro-liberty mid-stream; Baron’s close reading explains this mystery by establishing that the book must have started before Giangaleazzo’s death and ended after. When it looked like Florence’s collapse in the face of the Visconti menace was divinely ordained, Florentine writers understood Visconti through the same lens that Dante had; after Visconti’s death, they gained the breathing room to consider Florence’s heroic defense of liberty.

The Visconti episode might have passed into obscurity had it not reappeared in other guises time and again for the next century. Over and over, Florence found itself alone within Italy as one tyrant or another ran roughshod over the country. Over and over, it defended liberty when no one else did. Even these repeated battles would seem an obscure thing to study, if Baron didn’t argue for their cumulative effect: that Florentines built a new way of understanding the world, which he calls “civic humanism.” Civic humanists of the 14th century began to see the story of Florence within a broader arc that started in Rome or possibly in Athens. They began to map out the decaying effects of tyranny and the proper construction of a state. Their pinnacle lies with Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, considered by many (though I don’t exactly understand why) as the founding document of modern republican (small-r) government.

There’s always the danger that a book like this will be a fusty exercise in over-analysis. I myself was afraid on a few occasions that it would veer in that direction. Remarkably enough, given that it’s a deep dive into the precise dating of early-15th-century Renaissance documents, Baron’s book is utterly captivating. You feel like you’re following a detective in a mystery novel — except that this detective is chasing authors and philosophies rather than criminals.

Baron started an entire line of historical thinking with this book. The concept of civic humanism informs a great many other historical works, like Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and Elkins and McKitrick’s Age of Federalism. All of them helped to overthrow a persistent myth about the American Revolution: that it sprang fully formed from the brow of John Locke. The roots of American republicanism go back much further, and owe a lot to the Framers having read their Roman history. The tradition of which Baron is a part has vastly deepened and enriched the study of American history.