The Model Consolidates

Whereas the feudal lord could rely on his privileged position by birth alone, Castiglione's courtier fashioned a code for a new nobility which, being mostly of middle class origin, needed distinguishing traits in its outward appearance and behavior. The medieval nobleman had a use for manners only when he had to prove himself at court; the Renaissance nobleman needed them in all circumstances, since he often derived his power and status solely from having held office or having officeholders among his forebears. This gave rise to a relatively fixed political class—a phenomenon that had started in Venice early in the fourteenth century. Historians have pointed out that in the middle of the sixteenth century politics in Italy came to be formally associated with noble lineage.^[1] Although it was only in the relative stability of the years 1550–1560 that this situation became crystallized, Castiglione's portrait of the courtier reflects this incipient shift where it prescribes nobility and the imitation of the feudal knight by acquiring the martial arts (e.g., 1.14).^[2]

Since the new nobility no longer lived through feudal grants, the ethic of feudal rewards had outlived its function. Absolutist centralization tended to reserve land and fiscal rights for the state: the rewards for service were now offices, favor, and influence. Accordingly, traditional “liberality” acquired the bright new function of making the prince shine through a splendid theatrical display of wealth and power

which wrapped the whole court within its glow. Through the ancien régime, this life of conspicuous consumption became the trademark of princes and their acolytes, while courtiers looked on that style of life as a flattering backdrop for their own social preferment. Recent scholarship has stressed the element of “play” in the life of Castiglione's courts,^[3] but it might be more appropriate to speak of “theatricality.” The courtier sees himself as constantly on stage. Since he is what he seems to be, his social status is based on appearance.^[4] Shakespeare's generalization “the world's a stage” was clearly inspired by the spectacle of the court, and the baroque insistence on “the theater of the world” was motivated likewise. Recent critical focusing on the “mystification of power” and the process of “self-fashioning” implied in the court life of Elizabethan England and its literature points to a phenomenon that had common roots beyond those confines.^[5] The courtier had to be able to use his public image to his advantage, almost “pushing it ahead of his true self”: “whenever he has to go where he is not yet known, he must send there first, before his own person, a good image of himself, making it known that in other places, at the courts of other lords, ladies, and knights, he enjoys good esteem.”^[6]

The progress toward absolutism altered the nature of the courtierprince relationship: the excellence of the courtier as Castiglione describes it was of great value in laying a solid foundation for the deification of the prince, whose authority owed much to the convenient services of such public “educators.” Ottaviano Fregoso put it eloquently: “Helped by the instruction, education, and artfulness of such courtiers and formed by them to such prudence and goodness,  . . . the prince will be glorious and most dear to men and God, acquiring by God's grace that heroic virtue that will enable him to exceed the boundaries of humankind, so that he will be regarded more as a demigod than a mortal man.”^[7] The court becomes a functional backdrop for absolutism, preparing the ground for the transition to the state of an Elizabeth I or a Louis XIV, where the courtiers' relationship with the monarch will be the carefully managed stage for the monarch's exalted status. This assumed role of the new sort of princes will make them objects of “more than love, quasi-adoration” not only for the courtiers but for the citizenry as a whole, out of gratitude for a pattern of remuneration that by principle exceeds personal merit. Even while the rulers are expected to observe impartiality, equality, and merit in distributing justice and basic freedoms, their quasi-divine favors will be received as though imparted in ways that transcend objective merit.^[8] This special role also applied to

monarchs who, like Elizabeth, were effectively restrained by the aristocratic constitutionalism that was typical of England.

The new circumstances forced a process of adaptation for the traditional mix of courtly qualities. “Modesty,” for example, became the acknowledgment of the gratuitous nature of princely reward, whereas the feudal vassal's contractual relationship with his lord had once put him in a position to insist on such reward as a right—a right constantly proclaimed in troubadour poetry.

This fateful turning point in the conception of state power was grounded in the doctrine of the king as lex animata, law in form of a person possessing summa legibus soluta potestas, hence a supreme authority unbounded by law. Jean Bodin theorized as much, although he somewhat duplicitously yet diplomatically disapproved of Machiavelli's alleged agreeing with the doctrine—which, however, went back to medieval theology and institutional jurisprudence. The prince's arbitrary power was thus explicitly justified by the principle of the transcendence of sovereignty, according to the doctrine of “the king's two bodies” illustrated in a famous study by Ernst Kantorowicz (1957). Even in our time the principle can be invoked in relevant contexts, and not only for the most radical applications (like Hitler's theory of the Führerprinzip, declaring the person of the leader the only true source of right and law), but in democratic societies too (as when President Nixon's counsels invoked the principle of inherent power and executive privilege in the Watergate controversy).^[9]

The courtier does not claim the right to influence the prince by personal merit: he only relies on the prince's unpredictable pleasure and arbitrary, uncensurable choice. Castiglione was clear on the matter. The power relationships at court had grown beyond the encounter of competing personal rights of feudal times, when the king's attempts to establish himself as true sovereign had to overcome the feudal lords' resistance in the name of customary rights and privileges. The doctrine of the rex legibus solutus had to override the feudal notion of the king as simply suzerain, just enforcer of customs and laws. Lex facit regem, “the king issues from the law,” had been the rule, and the king who betrayed his mandate deserved his subjects' rebellion.^[10] We have seen that the doctrine of absolutism was potentially implied in the kings' thrust against feudalism, and I pointed to Giles of Rome's De regimine principum as exemplary in this respect (end of chap. 3).

At a time when authoritarian regimes were on the verge of crowding out the last surviving forms of representative government, Castiglione

attempted to map out a morally defensible type of princely state that was based on a well-groomed court of administrators and advisors. His formula might have satisfied the popular longing for justice, order, and peace by bracketing tensions and personal struggles within the enclosures of the courts and keeping in check the despots' irresponsible arbitrariness. Still, the people would have been excluded from any direct form of participation.^[11] Machiavelli's sympathies for effective republicanism were already discounted in Castiglione's experience, which corresponded to the patterns prevailing outside Florence and Venice.

Thus, around the middle of the sixteenth century the new sociopolitical situation forced a major shift in the self-image of the nobleman/gentleman. The ideals of courtliness and chivalry underwent a momentous reduction that centered the new idea of nobility on personal “honor,” with an accent on the duel as the definitive test of truth and merit. This produced a flowering of treatises on a new “science of chivalry,” dealing specifically with honor and duels. There had been a pioneer essay in the Neapolitan Paride dal Pozzo's (Paris a Puteo) Libellus de re militari ubi est tota materia duelli (ca. 1471, most successful in the often printed Italian version, ll duello ). Then came such often-reprinted works as Andrea Alciato's De singulari certamine (Paris, 1541; Lugduni: Antonius Vincentius, 1543); Girolamo Muzio's Il duello and Risposte cavalleresche (1550), II cavalier (Rome, 1569) as well as Il gentilhuomo, trattato della nobiltà (1571);^[12] Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano's Il duello regolato a Ie leggi dell'honore (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1551); the Eversiones singularis certaminis by Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola (1503–1565, Averroist philosopher at Bologna and then bishop of Caserta); Giambattista Possevino's (Mantua, 1520-Rome, 1549, brother of the Jesuit polymath and diplomat Antonio, and a participant at Bernardi's lectures) Dialogo dell'honore  . . . nel quale si tratta a pieno del duello (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari, 1553); Pompeo della Barba's Due  . . . dialoghi  . . . dei segreti della natura  . . . sull'armi e Ie lettere (Venice, 1558); Annibale Romei's Discorsi divisi in sette giornate,  . . . quinta della nobiltà, . . . settima della precedenza dell'arme e delle lettere  . . . (1585; ed. Marco Antonio Palazzolo, Verona: Gerolamo Discepoli, 1586; Venice, 1594); and finally, in the next century, Camillo Baldi's ponderous and somewhat conclusive tome on challenges (mentite, 1633).^[13] In book three of his Risposte cavalleresche, Muzio, official advisor on matters of chivalry to the successive governors of Milan, the Marquis of Vasto and don Ferrante Gonzaga, defined the laws of chivalry by the key principle that honor

supersedes all other values, including loyalty to the prince and the laws of the country.^[14]

I have mentioned (in chap. 1) the letras de batalla and pasos de armas, to wit, the endemic challenges and duels among Catalan and Aragonese noblemen. A similar study for Italy is still lacking: it would reveal no less obsession there with such practices of latter-day chivalry, despite widespread proscription by various authorities attempting to stem the tide of fashion.^[15] After a spate of severe edicts against duels in the 1540s, a series of duels took place publicly in the 1550s with much fanfare through various parts of Italy, including Milan and Rome. One eloquent example of related documentary material of the kind studied by Martín de Riquer should suffice here, namely the Cartelli e manifesti passati tra M. Perseo Boninsegni e M. Francesco Baldinaccio detto il Mancino d' Agubbio published in 1560.^[16] New restrictions came in the 1560s, aiming at least at superficial peace, not to mention conformity with Christian morality as demanded by the Counter-Reformation.

After 1560 definitions of nobility began to appear that were inspired by those of the humanists but were technically dependent on the newly published works of Jerónimo Osorio, professor of Sacred Scriptures at Coimbra and future bishop, André Tiraqueau (d. 1558), a member of the parlement of Paris, and Barthélemy de Chasseneux (d. 1541), president of the parlement of Aix-en-Provence.^[17] The two French authorities were interested in putting forward the viewpoint of the noblesse de robe, the new nobility that was playing an increasingly important role as representative of the high bourgeoisie and ally of the monarchy against the ancient nobility of the sword (but reserving the right to oppose the monarch when he infringed the privileges of this new corporate group).^[18] The Portuguese author submitted an impressive Christian codification of nobility with clear political overtones: nobility is based on the inheritance or direct exercise of qualities that serve the common good in public life. Though we are all born free, we still owe obedience to the power of the best, optimatum potestas, or their descendants, no matter how unworthy (and the progeny is often sadly unworthy of its ancestors), since social order and man's desire for peace demand it, while popular governments spell the ruin of their cities.^[19] Similarly in Muzio's 1571 II gentilhuomo, after the first book's generic definitions based on ancient and humanistic authorities (the Stoics, Seneca, Boethius, Dante, etc.), the second book faced the tricky problem of nobility not by virtue but by social position, and concluded that de facto nobility comes from having held important political office: this entails

the progeny's right to continue exercising such honorable social functions. Political power has become the prerogative of noble status—a notion implying a return to Bartolo da Sassoferrato's still authoritative equivalence between officium and nobilitas.^[20]

All this went hand in hand with a new surge of sumptuary laws that completed the separation of nobles and commoners. The 1560s witnessed a formal legitimization of nobility as an officially identifiable, separate physical entity: widespread decrees institutionalized specific orders of knighthood and prescribed their ways of dressing in public.^[21] One example should suffice. In 1562 Cosimo I instituted the Order of Santo Stefano, whose nobles were to be the new ruling class of Florence and Tuscany, personally issuing from the duke's will and dependent upon him. Only families of officeholders and members of the new nobility, not the members of the older nobility, were exempted from the restrictions of new sumptuary laws of the same year, which were meant to regulate dress and conspicuous consumption.^[22] All other states had or would soon have similar provisions.

Francesco Sansovino's 1566 Origine de' cavalieri, appropriately dedicated to Cosimo I, was a brave attempt to trace the growing multitude of precepts governing the religious orders of knighthood, starting with the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, who had become the Knights of Malta, down to Cosimo's Order of Santo Stefano. The rules of Malta became particularly rigorous in 1599, sanctioning the will to increase cloture of the new aristocracies. New Italian postulants had to prove two hundred years of nobility, with no involvement in either commerce, agriculture, or professional trades, including the notarial art, for a period of four generations, and without having held a public office of the sort that was also accessible to commoners. Such rules were particularly out of step with past social reality in Italy, and exceptions were made for four cities only: Genoa, Florence, Siena, and Lucca. Although restrictions applied to all members, special attempts were made to enforce them for the highest of the three grades of knighthood, starting with that of knight proper, with some leniency for the lower ones of chaplains and servants or sergeants at arms.^[23] This intended separation of the higher classes affected the style of the man of court, whose behavior was now meant to seal the prince's distance from his subjects. It has been noted that the new concepts of majesty and decorum definitively chased the quotidian, the lowly, and the popular from the courts, together with all once accepted forms of benevolent mixing with the populace.^[24]

It is not my purpose to survey the large body of literature on the concept of nobility: at least for Italy we possess an excellent such study by Claudio Donati (L'idea di nobiltà in Italia, 1988). But it seems fitting to close these notes on the Late Renaissance with a mention of Giovanni Botero (1543/4–1617), the Piedmontese political theorist, former Jesuit, and secretary to Archbishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan, whose late years were largely spent at the court of the Savoy Duke Emanuel Philibert. In a discorso published in 1607 and written for the instruction of the duke's third son, the paramount virtues as foundation of true nobility were declared to be, in order: religious piety, military fortitude, justice, and civil prudence, together with mastery of humane letters and liberal arts.^[25]

The ethos of curiality and courtliness had come about originally through an interpretation of the classical cardinal virtues with the addition of Cicero's decorum: this peculiar formula had become a prop for the image of true nobility. As we approach the end of the Renaissance, we observe that this heritage was adapted to a theatrical show of Castiglionesque gracefulness as the foundation of a new nobility, whose chief function was to serve the prince in his public display of splendor. After having become a courtier, the medieval knight had turned into a docile servant of princes in a hothouse where the court had replaced nature.