Savanarola vs. Medici Money Power

[Fester]

The Orthodox Nationalist has a fine show on the birth of rule by banking scum. http://reasonradionetwork.com/_archive/MRJ_20101125.mp3

I was doing a HH transcription but ran out of gas.  here's the first 20 minutes:

~ 3:00 – Renaissance not rediscovery of Classical culture, but a justification of  materialism and banking.  Pattern laid down by Medici bank will become the pattern we all find ourselves dealing with today. Only opposition was the Dominican Savanarola who was murdered after which the banking clans began their domination of our societies.

6:50 Medicis created the fraud of democracy which hides the domination of society by the bankers

Allison Brown 1986 shows that Medicis not legitimate, dominated government and major guilds from behind the scenes.  Says it was "republican theory" and its manipulation was used to justify their control = "the possession of money = success" which means that you are entitled to rule. Alison Brown (1986) "Platonism in fifteenth-century Florence and its contribution to early modern political thought," Journal of Modern History 58:383-413 (1986).

12:00 - All of the "Greats" of Renaissance were on the payroll of the Medicis.  Citizens were required to attend public speeches in front of legislative palace.

22:00 – the Medici elected at least 2 popes.  Couldn't be elected without their support.  Money had become the same thing as merit.

29:00 - elevation of Pope to position of unlimited power

[Fester]

George M'Hardy's book on Savonarola is available online here: (http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2573373A/George_M%27Hardy)

And here's a short essay by G.K. Chesterton on Savo:
http://www.readbookonline.net/read/20566/57630/

Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may never understand Savonarola.

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy: the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order; not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of man.

For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist. He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms; that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally anti-aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings. Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying that they are all the sons of God.

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the "Bow Bells Novelettes," and for the same reason--a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while "Macbeth" is in comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course. Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr. M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.

[pas]

Very interesting, thanks Fester

[Fester]

Most welcome, Pas.  I don't know the first thing and am eager to review the events through a new lens.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Many thanks Fester, it would be great to see Dr. Michael Rapheal Johnson interviewed on more channels. Perhaps it might pull more interesting details than what he brings out on the O.D.M.

[Fester]

Been meaning to ask if anyone is familiar with any texts on the move of the Venetian bankers to England.  I have a clear memory of seeing such a text while searching for The Cause of World Unrest (http://www.archive.org/stream/causeofworldunre00newyiala/causeofworldunre00newyiala_djvu.txt).  Had never seen the topic before and meant to follow up.  Current search attempts turn up nothing.

[Panoptimist]

Thanks for the book and article Fester! I'll get that Thomas Davidson article when I go on campus.

The Jews and the Medici

The fate of Tuscan Jewry in the early modern period was inextricably linked to the favor and the fortune of the House of Medici. Though a Jewish presence was registered in Lucca as early as the ninth century and a network of Jewish banks had spread throughout the region by the mid-fifteenth, the organized Jewish communities of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Livorno were political creations of the Medici rulers. And like the Medici Grand Dukedom itself, these communities took shape in the course of the sixteenth century.

In the 1490s, under the Catholic theocracy of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, both the Medici and the Jews were expelled from Florentine territory. When the Medici returned to power in 1512, the Jewish ban fell into abeyance, until the next expulsion of the Medici in 1527. In 1537 Cosimo de'Medici seized definitive control of the Florentine government and reorganized it as a princely state--the Dukedom (later Grand Dukedom) of Tuscany. This state flourished for two hundred years, under seven successive Medici rulers: Cosimo I, 1537-1574; Francesco I, 1574-1587; Ferdinando I, 1587-1609; Cosimo II, 1609-1621; Ferdinando II, 1621-1670; Cosimo III, 1670-1723; Gian Gastone, 1723-1737.

As a sovereign prince, Cosimo I was free to dictate new terms of Jewish resettlement according to his own best interests and those of his regime. Coming from a merchant family himself, Cosimo I recognized the vast potential of Jewish capital and Jewish entrepreneurship, dispersed by the Iberian expulsion of the 1490s. By the mid-1540s, less than ten years after he gained the throne, Cosimo I began recruiting affluent Spanish and Portuguese Jews for resettlement in his capital city of Florence and his chief port city of Pisa. At the same time, many displaced Italian Jews who were neither bankers nor wealthy merchants came to Tuscany as well, particularly after the final expulsion of the Neapolitan community in 1540 and the creation of ghettos in the Papal cities of Rome and Ancona in 1555.

Cosimo I's liberalism was limited in scope and pragmatic in principle. During the lifetime of his wife Eleonora di Toledo (married 1539, died 1562), it was probably also influenced by her strong relationship with Benvegnita Abravanel, whom the Duchess had known in Naples before her marriage and whose family eventually settled in Tuscany. In the first decades of Cosimo's rule, Jews thrived particularly in Pisa, where there developed an influential Jewish banking elite. This entrepreneurial class also produced famous rabbinical scholars, including Vitale (Yehiel) Nissim da Pisa, and his son Simone, who graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Pisa in 1554. There were also scattered settlements of Jewish men and women throughout Tuscany who enrolled in artisan guilds, owned houses and orchards, produced wool and other marketable goods and led generally stable lives.

After actively courting the Jews in the 1540's and 1550's and granting them many privileges, Cosimo I began retrenching in the late 1560's and 1570's as political relations with Spain and the Papal State became paramount. In 1567 he reimposed badges of identification for Jews, in 1570 shut the Jewish banks, and in 1570-71 restricted legal Jewish settlement to two new ghettos in Florence and Siena.

In practice, Medici rule was characterized by a shifting balance of privileges and concessions, and for Jews in Tuscany the door was never as open nor as closed as it might seem. For example, some returned to live in Pisa only a few years after their expulsion and a Jewish community was permitted, even encouraged, to thrive in that great "special case"--the city of Livorno. In 1591 and 1593, less than a quarter century after Cosimo I ghettoized his Jewish subjects, his son Ferdinando I invited Jewish merchants to to settle in Livorno, granting them free residence, unlimited access to trade and extensive self-government in this new Medicean free-port on the Mediterranean.

The Livorno experiment was a triumph of enlightened self-interest for both the Jews and the Medici. Indeed, this thriving commercial hub became so essential to the Tuscan economy that even Cosimo III (1671-1723), the most bigoted of the Medici Grand Dukes, had little choice but to respect Jewish rights there. Vast fortunes were made by an Iberian merchant aristocracy that gave Livorno Jewry its particular culture and character. However, the Livorno community also included "levantini" from Turkey and North Africa, "ashkenaziti" from Northern Europe and Italian Jews of various origins.

In addition to banking and trade, especially with the East, the Jews of Livorno developed diverse manufacturing enterprises. In the late sixteenth century, Maggino di Gabriele moved his glass and silk factories there from Pisa, in order to take advantage of the new freedoms. The Jews of Livorno established a monopoly on the Italian production of coral, which they frequently used to ornament their own liturgical objects. In 1632, they imported the first coffee into Italy and then opened the first coffee-houses. In 1650, Jedidiah Gabbai founded a Hebrew press in Livorno, giving rise to a major Jewish printing industry that supplied the Sephardic communities of North Africa and the Near East.

Livorno was a major center of Jewish commerce, second in Europe only to Amsterdam. It was also a leading center of Jewish study and mysticism, particularly under the influence of Rabbi Joseph ben Emanuel Ergas (1685-1732) and other proponents of the Kaballah. Indeed, business, religion, medicine and science could be complementary enterprises. The medical doctor Mose Cordovero was among the pioneers of banking in Livorno around the year 1600. Elia Montalto di Luna, in the early seventeenth century, practiced medicine at the Medici Court while writing treatises on ophthalmology, astronomy and comparative religion.

These fleeting references to people, places and events provide only a glimpse of the extraordinary richness of Jewish history and culture during the two centuries of Medici rule (1537-1743.) Although much historical research has already been done, scholars have only begun to mine the vast resources of the Florentine State Archive. Every day THE MEDICI ARCHIVE PROJECT is making exciting discoveries regarding Jewish affairs, not only in Tuscany but throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world--discoveries that continually reshape our understanding of the past and lead the way to future scholarship.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... edici.html

At the beginning of the 1400s, the Chancellor of Florentine Republic Leonardo Bruni praised his city as a model of liberty and justice for all, citizens and foreigners alike. He also extolled Florence's openness to, and protection of, asylum seekers: Because of Florence's reputation for generosity, all those who were exiled from their homeland and uprooted by seditious plots, or dispossessed on account of the envy of their fellow citizens, have always come to Florence as to a safe haven and unique sort of refuge. ... Hence, no one will ever think that he really lacks a homeland so long as the city of Florence continues to exist. In reality, the Florentine Republic was never the utopia described by the patriotic Bruni; however, compared with much of Europe at the time, Florence was a tolerant city and home to a thriving Jewish community. After the fall of the Republic, when Florence became a principality ruled by the Medici family, Cosimo I (Duke from 1537, then Grand Duke in 1570) made it a policy to protect his Jewish subjects. Though in the early 1570s, under papal pressure, the Grand Duke enclosed the Jews of Florence in a ghetto, where they were subject to precise regulations, the Florentine Jewish population grew. Located in the very center of town, the Florentine Ghetto at the end of the sixteenth century was emerging as one of Florence's busiest commercial centers, along with the shops in the nearby Ponte Vecchio, the Mercato Vecchio, and the Mercato Nuovo. A crossroads for scholars of Jewish backgrounds, doctors, (al)chemists, as well as merchants, Florence, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as a whole, became a haven for Southern European Jewry. Because of the global nature of the Medici Granducal Archive, the documents within the Medici Archive Project database also help us to map the migration of Jews within Europe as well as to record the flourishing and withering of Jewish communities outside of Florence (Siena, Livorno, Ancona, Pesaro, Ferrara, Mantua and Genoa as well as Thessalonica, Constantinople, Dubrovnik, and Oran). For instance, letters from Florentine ambassadors posted in Venice were especially rich with news of Jews, since this city served as clearinghouse for all sorts of information arriving from Europe and Asia. Though the majority of documents bring to life the vicissitudes of lesser known Jews, there is also substantial information on more prominent figures such as Benvenida Abravanel (intellectual, philanthropist, and tutor of Duchess Eleonora de' Toledo), Samuel Pallache (Moroccan pirate and diplomat), Shabbetai Zevi (founder of the Sabbatean Movement and self-proclaimed Messiah), Benedetto Blanis (alchemist and cabbalist), Jacobiglio Ebreo (ancient medals dealer in Florence, Venice, and Constantinople). The Medici Granducal Archive is an impressive historical reservoir for Jewish history. Its content bears witness to the crucial role (often unspoken) played by Jews in the construction of the Italian Renaissance, especially in the artistic and cultural spheres. Though substantial effort has been directed towards this endeavor, the surface has barely been scratched. The history of the Jews of Tuscany is still largely unwritten and unknown. Although over the years some good books have been written on the subject, the larger amount of the primary sources on this subject contained in the Medici Archive in Florence remains unexplored. Up until now the strategy of the Medici Archive Project has been to create a database of all documents relating to Tuscan Jewry that were discovered by chance in the course of other investigations. Totaling some 700 historical documents, to which new ones are added continually, this database features material utterly unknown to the academic community. But so far we are only scratching the surface. In order to create a credible and efficient source for the study of Jewish life under the Medici two things need to happen: The current database of Jewish documents must be vetted, tagged, the documents must be summarized and excerpted, and, most importantly, the database must be placed online so that it can be visible for free to anyone anywhere in the world interested in the subject; We must start an in-depth exploration to bring to light all or most Jewish-related documents still hidden in the Archive. One or more Medici Archive Fellows specializing in Jewish history must conduct this exploration.

Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the Medici Archive Project

The Research Director of the Medici Archive Project in Florence receives frequent queries and requests for assistance from individuals conducting their own research on Jewish history. While he tries to help as much as he can, the growth of interest in Jewish history is making it practically impossible to satisfy all applicants. A more systematic approach to this issue is called for, one that will make it easier for researchers to find they way through the maze of documentation at the Archive. In order to achieve this goal the Medici Archive Project is currently trying to establish, with the support of interested institutions, two three-year Fellowships in Jewish Studies to be awarded to promising scholars who will concentrate exclusively on the Jewish aspect of the Archive. Past experience teaches us that when research is concentrated in one specific area of the Archive important findings are bound to surface; some of them are so crucial that they change previously held historical assumptions. The Medici Archive Project is committed to reclaiming this important lost history.

    *

http://www.medici.org/jewish-history/jewish-focus

[Panoptimist]

Thomas Davidson - Savonarola [1908]

 

[Fester]

Many thanks, Panop!  Nice to get that one in hand.