Abstract
The idea of chance, and more specifically, distinctive ways of managing chance, played a decisive role in shaping Renaissance Florentine culture, humanist philosophy, everyday Florentine practices, and Florentine social institutions. Humanist discourse around the notion of fortuna labored to reconcile the evident existence of fortuitous events with Christian understandings of the orderliness and goodness of the world. With Alberti and Machiavelli, chance becomes more capricious and less embedded within a specifically Christian cosmology, pointing the way to more modern understandings of the interplay of contingency and agency. Meanwhile, we see significant management of risk in commercial life, modifications to the rule of selecting office-holders by lot in political life, and techniques for managing the fatefulness of social interaction within Florence’s patronage-based social system, all of which suggest the importance of chance in structuring key Florentine social institutions. Overall, Florence exhibited neither primitive nor fully modern methods of theorizing chance, complicating simplistic binary understandings of what was in fact a complex cognitive shift across historical epochs.
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04 November 2021
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Notes
Alternatively, one might think of these elements, respectively, as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture.’ But that terminology is a little too simplistic—because ‘high’ theological and humanistic concerns seeped down into everyday consciousness, and because the Florentine elite were hardly the common folk about whom historians of popular culture like Ginzburg (1980) and Sabean (1984) have written. The formal and substantive connections between high culture and popular culture are rarely explored by intellectual historians, or by social historians and cultural sociologists, who often divide empirical material into distinctly separate piles for analysis. That said, when culture theorists treat entire cultural complexes as unified wholes with single organizing frameworks—as if, for example, fortuna existed as some kind of extra-individual, systemic code imprinted on all social action—we over-simplify dramatically.
Baxandall (1972) does something like this for Renaissance Florentine art, asking for instance, “how the commercial awareness of and interest in numbers and proportion was reflected in or otherwise linked to [appreciation of] proportion in painting” (p. 101). By contrast, Skinner (1978) makes too little effort to link his account of the emergence of civic humanist political philosophy to Florentine social history.
Here we detect a commonality with the Azande deployment of witch-doctors and oracles to combat misfortune supernaturally and superstitiously (Evans-Pritchard 1937).
Pitti’s (2015) memoirs, for example, discuss such complicated situations. Compare Douglas’s comments on the dangers patrons and clients pose to each other in Mandari society (1966, pp. 103–104), and the Azande belief that when misfortune strikes, it is likely due to witchcraft practiced by socially proximate personal enemies (Evans-Pritchard 1937, p. 101).
There is some resemblance here with Douglas’s ideas about dirt-affirmation (1966, pp. 164ff.), where engagement with potentially impure, unclean, or dangerous objects or alters is necessary to avoid a kind of cultural stasis and to reaffirm cultural values.
The title of the first chapter of Weissman’s (1982) book on Florentine social relations—“Judas the Florentine”—vividly captures the danger patronage ties posed to individual and collective well-being.
Of course, any simplification of “a culture” is perilous. As Burke (1997, p. 183) notes, the “postulate of cultural unity” is difficult to sustain. Even as culture is undoubtedly comprised of elements that profoundly shape human behavior and constitute the social order (Alexander and Smith 2003), any given culture remains a highly complex entity (Patterson 2014), a heterogeneous soup with a multitude of disparate ingredients rather than creamy consistency (Swidler 2001; Martin 2010). To say there was a single culture of chance in Florence invites suspicion. Nevertheless, I am postulating more resemblance across social domains in Florence than in modern societies.
This bifurcated view persists, notwithstanding Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) effort to understand contemporary risk from an anthropological perspective, and notwithstanding the many ways in which people today continue to interpret unpredictable and unforeseen events in magical (providential, fateful, astrological) ways, not unlike the Azande.
Mormando (1999, p. 27) offers greater chronological precision: those living in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries experienced chronic catastrophic warfare, widespread economic depression, chronic famine, religious schism, persistent threat of invasion, and of course, the Black Death, which swept through Florence in seven waves between 1348 and 1430.
Contrast Florentine efforts at combatting fortune by means of moral purity with the Azande technique of trying to evade misfortune by moving around unpredictably (Evans-Pritchard 1937, pp. 265–266)! That approach aligns more with Machiavelli’s than with Petrarch’s.
The list of later authors would include minimally Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540).
Patch (1922, p. 210) adds that the plot of the Decameron depends heavily on chance—that is, on coincidental encounters and unexpected events—as a motor force.
Astrology purports to be a systematic method of explaining unexpected events and tumultuous fortunes as if they had a secure causal basis and meaningful provenance in the alignment of stars and planets (for example, Douglas 1966, p. 81). As such, it was popular among the Stoics (Osler 1994, p. 81), but also in the Renaissance (Poppi 1988, pp. 644–645). Nevertheless, Salutati argued that it was a delusion, Pico della Mirandola vociferously refuted it as false science, and San Bernardino denounced it as heretical (Mormando 1999, p. 18).
The title of the Intercenales suggests leisurely improvisation, and the pieces themselves are often imitative of satirical classical works (Alberti 1987, p. 5). Arguably, the improvisational form rests on the conceit that the text or its message ‘could have been otherwise,’ hence implicitly legitimizing the idea of contingency.
Note the echo with Salutati’s treatise of the same name.
This phrase echoes a passage from Cicero—but with a noteworthy difference. Whereas Cicero claims, “to yield to the pressures of the time, that is, to obey necessity, has always been considered a wise man’s part,” Alberti seems to equate present circumstances not with “necessity,” but with caprice. Fortune is much more “randomly tempestuous” (Marsh 2003, p. 18) in Alberti’s view.
Petrarch uses the word fortuna in the sense of a storm in at least two places (Canzoniere, ##272 and 292). The chronicler Giovanni Villani used it similarly, as did undoubtedly many others. A letter of September 16, 1422, written by a group of Florentine officials to Averardo di Francesco de’ Medici (Mediceo Avanti il Principato [hereafter MAP] I, 40) echoes this usage. The letter informs Averardo that a boat laden with merchandise has nearly capsized and been forced to enter the unfriendly port of Portofino, in Genovese territory, “to flee however possible from fortune/the storm” (quantunque per fuggire fortuna).
For examples, see MAP V, 201, Giuliano Ginori to Averardo de’ Medici, May 12, 1432; MAP XI, 439, Aldobrandino di Giorgio del Nero to Cosimo de’ Medici, October 6, 1440; Carte Strozziane III, 150:108b, Mariotto di Piero della Morotta to Agnolo di Palla degli Strozzi, May 31, 1445.
For the text, see www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA0733/). This website and http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/provide access to numerous additional searchable digitized texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Machiavelli’s references to fortuna are especially numerous in The Prince (19.8/10000) and his Life of Castruccio Castracani (12.7/10000). Both are discussed briefly below.
The illegitimacy of his own birth was a crucial factor here.
Many of these terms—which appear frequently in Florentine patronage letters—come together in Battista’s short laudatory remarks to Lionardo in Book II: “Neither work nor diligence shall be lacking in us, Lionardo, on this and every other occasion, to be obedient to you and like you. And as you further assure us that even ordinary friendships may be most useful, not only to us but to the whole family, Carlo and I promise you always, in every [matter touching the family’s] honor and profit (onore e utile), that you shall see us with all strength and cleverness (ingegno), wherever necessary, contriving to exercise ourselves (adoperarci) against whatever threat were a bother (fatica) or danger to it, most readily” (1969, p. 106; slightly modified for greater literalness).
Baron (1955, pp. 159–60) quotes Dati as follows: “To be conquered and become subjects, this never seemed to the Florentines to be a possibility; for their minds are so alien to such an idea that they could not bring themselves to accept it in any of their thoughts. Each time they imagined themselves to have many remedies, and certainly, a heart that is free and sure of itself never fails to bring it about that some way and remedy is found. Always they comforted themselves with the hope, which in their eyes was a certainty on which they could count, that a commune cannot die, while the Duke was one single mortal man, whose end would mean the end of his empire.”
Playing cards (referred to as naibi, or by similar terms) are first mentioned in various European towns in the 1370s (Farley 2009, p. 9). They seem not to have been associated with gambling. The tarot card deck, for a game called i trionfi or tarocchi, evolved from the normal playing card deck and first appears in Milan in the early fifteenth century. The mystical significance of various cards in the tarot deck arises much later (Farley 2009). Consequently, it is anachronistic to associate cards with fortune-telling or the occult in the Italian Renaissance.
Pitti repeatedly adopted a gambler’s mentality in his social dealings. He boldly lied to the security officer he encountered on the road outside Florence during the Ciompi uprising (2015, p. 266), he displayed plucky behavior as captain of Pistoia in 1399 (2015, pp. 294f.), and he engaged in daring strategizing against the lord of Lucca in 1402 (2015, p. 307). All of these episodes speak to a risk-taking mindset and cocky strategy for interpersonal relations.
The commune initiated a comprehensive collection of information on household wealth in the city and its environs in 1427. Every household was required to submit information on their landed wealth, shares of the public debt, involvement in commercial activity, personal credits and debts, ongoing expenditures, and a list of household members, to ascertain how much each household could be called upon to contribute in taxes (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985). It is a documentary source of unparalleled richness.
Goro di Stagio Dati, the businessman and author of the fortuna-laced history of Florence discussed above, explicitly wrote about sortition this way in his memoirs (Dati 2015, p. 371), interpreting his selection for office as a kind of vindication for his diligence in avoiding bankruptcy.
As Goffman (1967, p. 237) writes, “Given the belief that character can be dramatically acquired and lost, the individual will plainly have reason for going through a chancy situation no matter what the likely material or physical cost to himself…. Plainly, it is during moments of action that the individual has the risk and opportunity of displaying to himself and sometimes to others his style of conduct, when the chips are down.”
See, for example, MAP III, 151; V, 748; XXVII, 354, 385, 388; XXIX, 59; CXXXVIII, 39; Conventi Soppressi 78,314:476 and 322:79.
See, for example, MAP XII, 26; XXVIII, 309; XXIX, 98; XXXIX, 108; Carte Strozziane III, 130:233.
John McCormick (2018, private communication) notes that Machiavelli does this repeatedly in his writings. He says that he does not want to seem presumptuous just before his most presumptuous statements.
To be allo specchio meant being ineligible for office-holding, primarily on account of tax arrears.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Philip Smith for their excellent suggestions leading to significant improvements in this article. I also thank Rick Biernacki, Bill Caferro, Chip Clarke, Bill Connell, David Gibson, David Marsh, John McCormick, John Padgett, Orlando Patterson, Michael Sauder, Hana Shepherd, and Eunkyung Song for their insightful feedback. I am grateful to the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington for providing me with a welcoming space to work on this article during the 2019 Winter and Spring quarters. Thanks to Connor Gilroy, Jerry Herting, Yuan Hsiao, Steve Pfaff, Sarah Quinn, and especially Kate Stovel, for stimulating conversations at UW. Special thanks to Jackson Lears for including me in a multi-disciplinary seminar at Rutgers many years ago on the theme of chance that motivated me to pursue this project.
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