Free THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES by Philip Bobbitt

laboratory we can see the mimetic, competitive, reactive relationships among these states and the significance of these relationships for the constitutional order.
    The Italian peninsula was dominated by five city-realms: Rome, Naples, Milan, Florence, and Venice. The center of the Renaissance in Italy was Florence, whose situation was similar to that of the other city-realms. It was her solution to that situation that provided other cities with the form on which the princely state was modeled. What were the characteristics of the Italian situation within which Florence and other cities found themselves?
    First, the cities were defined geographically, as opposed to the usual springing dynastic inheritances of princes. Realms that were increased (or decreased) by the happenstance of inheritance and marriage often yielded disparate, unconnected properties scattered across Europe. This tended to fracture rather than consolidate a common culture. Second, the cities were wealthy—Florence had an annual income greater than that of the king of England and the revenue of Venice and its
Terra Ferma
at the middle of the fifteenth century was 60 percent higher than that of France, more than double that of England and Spain 12 —in a world that had recently come to a money economy. These cities could afford a bureaucracy and profit by it. Third, the wealth of the cities was coveted by others; yet the cities had populations too small to create effective militias, and therefore required mercenaries. Fourth, the Italian rulers of these city-realms faced a new and menacing technology that threatened to make obsolete the sheltering walls and turrets that protected them from their French and Habsburg predators.
    This transition from prince to princely state provides us with an initial example of a strategic imperative animating a constitutional innovation—an instance, that is, where the insistent question of security in a specific context (geography, wealth, small population) yields a new legal solution and requires a story to rationalize that solution. If the constitutional innovation of the modern state was in part a response to the threat posed by mobile artillery to the walled cities of Italy, the precise shape of that response—the princely state—was not governed by strategic considerations alone, but also by the felt need to ensure legitimacy for the leadership that wedded its future to this new creation.
    A vulnerability rooted in questions of dynastic legitimacy underlay all the principal city-states of Italy. Consider the situation of the cities' leaders in 1454. In Milan, the dynastic line had ended in 1447; one candidate for the succession was Francesco Sforza, a
condottiere
and the husband of thelast male heir's illegitimate daughter. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, claimed the Duchy of Milan as forfeit to the Empire, there being no rightful dynastic claimant. The Kings of France and Spain also pressed claims.
    Florence was effectively ruled by the Medicis, a banking house whose head, Cosimo, had returned in triumph from exile in 1434 to dominate the Signory, an oligarchical body. By his command of capital, Cosimo was able to affect events throughout Europe, including, for example, the Wars of the Roses (through loans to Edward IV), and to paralyze Naples and Venice by withholding credit that would have been used to finance mercenaries. Yet the Medici ruled by competence, not royal bloodlines, and thus always had to refresh their legitimacy through further successful acts on behalf of Florentine society.
    In Venice, the ruling group of merchant oligarchs, the Signoria, had led the city to an expansion on the mainland, seizing towns and fortresses from the Milanese—in an effort to make Venice self-sufficient in food—and also from the Empire, Naples, and the Papacy. Unlike the other cities, Venice was an international maritime power, but her new acquisitions made her vulnerable to a coalition of forces that would,