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ITALY

ITALY. The early modern period following the Renaissance is only now emerging from long neglect by historians, who once considered the period one of unbroken decline. This neglect is paradoxical considering that it was in the period of the late Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation that Italy attained its greatest influence in the Western world and a degree of wealth and sophistication that gave it the pilot role in European civilization. The two-and-a-half centuries following the end of the Italian wars in 1559 do not constitute a single period, however.

ITALIAN STATES

Unlike France, England, and Castile, which were relatively centralized monarchies with deep roots in the Middle Ages, and unlike Germany, which was a loose-knit confederation of a myriad of relatively stable states under the benign leadership of the Holy Roman emperor, Italy lacked a simple over-arching political framework that enjoyed a wide consensus. Medieval wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, partisans of papal and imperial authority, respectively, were fought to a stalemate where the reality of power lay with each major city and each great lord in central and northern Italy. Then a gradual and fairly rapid process of elimination of the small states by the larger ones resulted in a political map articulated around less than a dozen territorial states by the time of the Peace of Lodi in 1451. The large-scale Italian wars beginning in 1494 simplified this situation even more after a half-century of intermittent fighting. When the wars were over, the king of Spain, Philip II (ruled 1555–1598), was duke of Milan and king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. A handful of Italian princes seated in Turin, Mantua, Ferrara, Parma, Florence, and Urbino were reduced to satellite status. The pope had now become effective ruler over all the Papal States in central Italy by eliminating the virtual independence of city-states like Perugia or Bologna. Three medieval city-republics still survived: the powerful Venetian state jealous of its independence, the rich but subservient Genoese republic, and the almost insignificant Luccan state. Once the French threat was definitively removed by a long succession of religious conflicts (1561–1629), Italy enjoyed the fruits of a Pax Hispanica that underpinned its economic growth and its new institutional stability.

The new principalities themselves were significant improvements over the unstable coalitions of interests in small city-states. Dynasties like the Medici in Florence, the Farnese in Parma, and the Savoy in Turin gradually reined in the privileges and the autonomy of feudal lords and ensured greater stability by offering more impartial justice. Italian urban governments were as efficient as those anywhere, and the political prerogatives enjoyed by established families in the towns and cities of central and northern Italy enabled them to govern conjointly with their princes. These princes also took the first steps to empower the elites of subject towns in their bureaucracies and employed them at their courts. While most princes built citadels to guarantee the docility of local nobles, they also entrusted the peasantry with arms and training as territorial militia. With time, even the new, upstart dynasties planted roots in the territories they ruled, cajoled the aristocracy to cooperate with them, wove alliances, and multiplied marriages with other dynasties in Europe. In short, they acquired legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects.

Similarly, the king of Spain held Neapolitan and Sicilian barons on a tighter leash and kept them from each others' throats. These aristocrats readily admitted the usefulness of a strong foreign monarch who served as a safety valve against overbearing and ambitious members of their own group. Spain held out many rewards for their compliant obedience and granted noble families ample autonomy in their fiefs. Spanish imperial ventures in the New World, in the Mediterranean, and in Flanders gave Italian elites almost everywhere a worthy theater in which to display their bravura and achieve their most lofty ambitions. Spanish power also kept the peace in Italy by barring the way to invaders and mediating the tensions arising between Italian states. Most of Italy lived contentedly in the Spanish shadow, and its elites joined the great Catholic crusades against heresy in Flanders, in France, and against the Turks in Hungary and the Mediterranean. More pacific Italians enriched themselves by helping finance the great Spanish military machine.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

This long sixteenth century, lasting until 1620, marked the creation of the first truly global economy with ramifications in Asia and the Americas. Much of the great flow of silver from the Spanish New World was diverted to the coffers of Italian businessmen who then reinvested it in large-scale trade. Italy enjoyed a number of cultural advantages it had accumulated since the Middle Ages. With Arabic numerals, with widespread numeracy, and commonplace recourse to paper transactions, Italians developed the most sophisticated financial and credit mechanisms anywhere. Italy's high-quality urban manufactures dominated the lucrative luxury sectors of international commerce, the skills to produce them protected and enhanced continually in each city. Venice was probably the most important industrial city in Europe, if not the world. Milan was

Italian Ruling Dynasties
Duchy of Mantua
Francesco II Gonzaga (1484–1519)
Federico II (1519–1540)
Francesco III (1540–1550)
Guglielmo (1550–1587)
Vincenzo I (1587–1612)
Francesco IV (1612)
Ferdinando (1612–1626)
Vincenzo II (1626–1627)
Carlo I (1627–1637)
Carlo II (1637–1665)
Carlo Ferdinando (1665–1708)
Duchy of Ferrara, Modena & Reggio
Alfonso I d'Este (1476–1534)
Ercole II (1534–1559)
Alfonso II (1559–1597)
Cesare (1597–1628): bastard branch, minus Ferrara
Alfonso III (1628–1644)
Francesco I (1644–1658)
Alfonso IV (1658–1662)
Francesco II (1662–1694)
Rinaldo (1694–1737)
Francesco III (1737–1780)
Ercole III (1780–1803)
Duchy of Urbino
Guidobaldo I Montefeltro, (1503–1508)
Francesco Maria I Della Rovere (1508–1516 & 1521–1538)
Guidobaldo II (1538–1574)
Francesco Maria II (1574–1631)
Duchy of Parma and Piacenza
Pier Luigi Farnese (1545–1547)
Ottavio (1547–1586)
Alessandro (1586–1592)
Ranuccio (1592–1622)
Odoardo (1622–1646)
Ranuccio II (1646–1694)
Francesco (1694–1727)
Antonio (1727–1731)
Philippe de Bourbon (1748–1765)
Ferdinando (1765–1802

a vast workshop fed from the great Po valley and provisioned, like the manufacturing cities around it in Lombardy, from much of Europe. Cities like Florence, Bologna, and Naples were also notable centers of manufacturing in a broad range of activities. This economy was directed, at the top, by large-scale bankers, dominated by the Genoese, meeting annually in Piacenza to sort out the exchange and credit needs of all of Europe. The manufacturing economy was complemented by one of the most efficient agricultural economies in the Western world, giving Italy the highest population density in Europe. The successful integration of livestock-raising, tree and vine crops, and cereals in central and northern Italy permitted landlords to utilize scant resources more rationally. If the country was not quite self-sufficient in food supplies, ruling elites adopted complex administrative measures to avert urban famine.

Italy was not least the seat of the Catholic Church. Despite the challenge to its hold over western Europe with Protestant reformations in Germany, France, and England, the great and complex institution survived and gradually recovered. The long and intermittent Council of Trent (1545–1563) enhanced the unity of the institution, while new religious orders like the Jesuits bolstered the power of the pontiff. The new Roman Inquisition (founded in 1542) quickly crushed any hint of nonconformity in Italy, while an array of committees rejuvenated the basic texts and doctrines of the faith. The Roman Curia grew to become one of the great courts of Europe, and the city of Rome grew with it, largely rebuilt and deploying modern concepts and tools of urbanism that made the Eternal City the most modern metropolis on the continent and a great repository of both sacred and secular architecture. The Council of Trent had far-reaching consequences for the practice of Catholicism throughout the world, but Italy was its motor, the area of recruitment of its most active proponents. It took decades for the central organs of the church to apply the council's decisions to the urban and rural hinterland, and much longer for these changes to bear fruit. Nevertheless by 1600 the reforms were everywhere in full swing, with the aim of Christianizing Italians in depth. One effect was to make the church an ever more powerful political entity that expanded its jurisdiction and its taxing power with respect to the state. Members of the social elite flocked to enter both old and new religious orders, or saw the church as a coveted career choice. Clerical discipline and doctrine were then relayed to men and women in both city and country via ever more numerous confraternities.

CULTURAL LEADER OF EUROPE

Italy's cultural inventions provided the standards to which Europeans complied in literature, architecture, art, and music until the end of the nineteenth century, although the country lost some of its pilot role by 1650. The era is synonymous with the baroque aesthetic, fashioned in Rome in the late 1500s, and often closely associated with the Catholic Church. Italian spectacles and festive activities were something of a magnet for Europeans, who imitated its styles. In music, both the small-scale madrigal and the large-scale opera were inventions of the period with a long future. Italian cities invented the modern conservatory to train professional musicians, as they invented the art academy as a place to master the techniques and the theory of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Rome and Venice witnessed the emergence of the first art "market" where buyers and sellers exchanged artworks as commodities. Over time, the baroque aesthetic gradually simplified to announce the basic principles of what would become neoclassicism in the eighteenth century. Italy remained the favorite destination of painters and architects seeking models elaborated in both modern and ancient times.

The proponents of all these reforms and inventions were very largely aristocrats. Urban living had given them a patina of urbanity that combined gentle birth, good breeding, a high level of education, and the ability to choose among a wide array of professional and amateur activities without equal in Europe. The humanist models of virtù exercised in this world were taught formally to nobles in Jesuitrun colleges created first in Italy and then exported throughout the Catholic world and beyond. At first, little prevented the active involvement of noblemen in commerce and manufacture, but as aristocratic mores formed a proper doctrine by the late sixteenth century, they began to withdraw from the active role to celebrate a more genteel otium ('leisure'). Yet it was precisely this detachment from mundane affairs that other Europeans found compelling. The pomp and formality of aristocracy defined the early modern elite, and even the age.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The Italian pilot role was snatched away suddenly around 1620. The country was never fully protected from foreign threats. During all of the early modern age, Barbary pirates infested the Mediterranean and the Adriatic seas, seizing ships laden with merchandise belonging to Italians. Worse, flotillas of Muslim pirates raided coastal villages and carried off the population into slavery in North Africa or the Middle East. At times, even substantial cities like Reggio Calabria could be sacked by the largest of such flotillas. Italians and Spaniards responded by building a vast network of coastal fortresses and towers, manned with troops and backed with militia to rally threatened districts. The great Ottoman fleets were smashed at Lepanto in 1571, but insecurity reigned thereafter, checked only by the expansion or creation of Catholic crusading flotillas of the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem and of Santo Stefano, operating out of Malta or Livorno, or the small papal and Savoyard squadrons combined with Spanish vessels based in Genoa, Naples, or Sicily.

WARS AND POLITICS

The corsair raids were mere pinpricks next to the eruption of large-scale warfare in Italy and Europe after about 1613, which engulfed first the northern states and then gradually all the others. The Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, widened to include France intermittently after 1625 and permanently after 1635. Northern Italy became a frequent battleground for contending armies, while other territories contributed troops and money, mostly in support of Habsburg Austria and Spain. The consequences of large-scale, long-term warfare threw the Italian economies into upheaval, destroying networks of credit and exchange, closing off markets, closing workshops, weakening survivors to the point of making them more vulnerable to contagious diseases. By the 1640s, mounting taxes and a dizzying public debt triggered a massive uprising in the kingdom of Naples that imperiled the Spanish regime. If the region saw the rapid recovery by Spain, the kingdom of Naples was too exhausted to remain a pillar of Spanish strength. During the seventeenth century, King Philip IV (ruled 1621–1665) privatized most of his assets in southern Italy in a desperate attempt to find cash to fight the war, reducing royal power in that region to a shadow. It would be decades before Spanish viceroys could muster enough strength in the form of tax revenue to impose their control over the mountainous hinterland and impose obedience on the most turbulent feudal lords. In Sicily, too, the number of troops in the coastal fortresses contracted to the edge of insignificance. Even Venice was drawn into a long and costly defense of its overseas empire against the Ottoman Turks in three very costly wars (1645–1670, 1684–1699, 1714–1718) that reduced its presence in the Middle East to a mere shadow. Hundreds of Venetian patricians died on the ramparts of Candia (present-day Hania), the capital of Crete, or in desperate sea battles with the Turks in the Aegean or the Dardanelles, or of typhus and plague contracted during military operations.

With the eclipse of Spanish power everywhere in Europe, Italian states became pawns in the new European state system articulated around a handful of emergent great powers. Challenged repeatedly by France, Spain was hard pressed to defend its overseas colonies and its European possessions. It almost lost Sicily in the 1670s in the aftermath of an urban revolt at Messina (1674–1678), and Naples and Sardinia escaped conquest only due to French lack of initiative. French pressure on Italian states convinced those princes and republics to let lapse their ties and alliances with Madrid. Only in 1690 did a challenge to French ambitions emerge with the Habsburg emperor Leopold I's (ruled 1657–1705) dispatch of an army to northern Italy, intent on filling the Spanish vacuum with an Austrian one. Leopold I intended to impose his jurisdiction (and his claims to Italian taxes) on the whole of northern and central Italy, as Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) had been briefly able to do in the sixteenth century. The demilitarization of most of the Italian states after the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648 forced the smaller states without large standing armies, like Genoa, Mantua, Florence, and Modena, to comply reluctantly with imperial ultimatums. This crisis came to a head during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) when the extinction of the Spanish Habsburg line opened a succession contested between France and the rest of Europe. Most of Spain acclaimed Louis XIV's grandson Philip as king and heir of all the Spanish dominions in 1700. However, the prospect of combining the weak global empire of Spain with the powerful and populous kingdom of France was too horrible to contemplate for the Austrian Habsburgs and their allies in England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Spanish territories in Italy meekly accepted the Bourbon candidate, Philippe d'Orléans, and most accepted the presence of French armies in Italy to defend the inheritance. The Gonzaga rulers of Mantua openly sided with the "Gallispans," as they were called. Piedmont was dragged into the French alliance at the outset of the war but changed sides in 1704. Campaigning on a scale never before seen, between the Gallispan forces and the imperial and Piedmontese in northern Italy, culminated in the perilous siege of Turin by the French in 1706. A victory there would probably have entrenched the Bourbon dynasty in Italy. At the last minute, an imperial army under Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) maneuvered its way to Piedmont and routed the Gallispan army and chased it out of Italy. In the subsequent campaigns, Austrian armies occupied all of Lombardy and the kingdom of Naples and imposed imperial tutelage on all the smaller states. Over the subsequent decades, Vienna would patiently extend its authority over them all, with the exception of Piedmont and Venice, which had substantial armies of their own.

ECONOMY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

The legacy of war in the seventeenth century included both disease and ruin. Hard times magnified the impact of diseases like the plague that swept away a quarter of the population of northern Italy in 1630 and then a quarter of southern Italy in 1656. The decline of food prices in the aftermath of the plagues also served to depress the entire economy, with the result that most peasants lost the land they owned due to insufficient revenues in hard times. Widespread misery took a lethal toll in frequent outbreaks of typhus, which killed hundreds of thousands of people each time there was a general harvest failure. Widespread poverty drove prices downward for at least a century, between 1620 and 1730, forcing all to curtail spending and investment. The urban manufactures lost their markets abroad and then increasingly their markets at home, too. Instead of importing food and raw materials and exporting high-quality manufactured goods, as in the past, Italians imported ever more manufactured goods from France, the Netherlands, and England, and sold agricultural commodities and semifinished products in exchange. From what we can measure, standards of living in Italian cities and villages declined along with the population. This was not an economic crisis, per se, preparing a rapid recovery. Rather, Italy fell quickly and enduringly behind its northern European neighbors and became the very example of stagnation and decline.

Italy lost its cultural ascendancy in the same period. After spearheading the mathematization of the universe, Italian philosophers formulated the first serious challenge to the Aristotelian worldview that the church supported. However, the church grew in strength throughout this crisis period, and with the active support of Italian princes, it mobilized against new currents in philosophy and science in an enduring manner. If Italy retained a larger number of universities and academies compared to other countries, these were gradually coopted by religious authorities vigilant against dangerous novelties. Italian elites ceased their campaign to spread literacy in cities and villages. Europe's cultural center of gravity shifted away from northern Italy to settle on the triangle of Paris-London-Amsterdam, which became the fulcrum of the Enlightenment.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century nevertheless witnessed a partial recovery of Italy, though it did not begin to close the gap with northwest Europe. The long depression of the European economy ended around 1730 as the newly rising population began to raise prices and intensify commercial exchanges. Italy's once-prized urban manufactures continued to lose ground, and the country ruralized further, while in northern Europe the cities gained ground absolutely and relatively. Nevertheless, famines became less frequent as large-scale maize and rice cultivation introduced these high-yield crops into the staple diet. A new interest in agricultural questions among the elite sparked an era of innovation and experiment, and investments aimed to reclaim farmland from marshes and hillsides. The Italian population increased from thirteen million to eighteen million at the end of the century, but European population increase was stronger outside Italy. Fortunes were made supplying grain and other foodstuffs to the cities, and the country exported food and other agricultural products like raw silk. Economic thinkers began to suggest lifting the number of restrictions hedging agricultural production and distribution, in the expectation that landlords would produce more food as prices rose. The widespread famines of the mid-1760s constitute a watershed in that governments everywhere began to liberalize the economy, and the grain trade in particular. Production did indeed rise, but prices rose relentlessly, too, and with them, misery proved irrepressible.

The same liberalizing trends were introduced into manufacturing, with the same mixed results. State monopolies and privileges protecting specific industries did not prove very successful. After mid-century, governments began to turn a blind eye to breaches in the regulations. Governments contributed to the expansion by investing effort in roads, canals, and monetary stability. More typically, new initiatives scattered to the countryside and used peasant labor that was abundant and cheap in the off-season. By the late eighteenth century, the future geography of Italian industry was already perceptible in Piedmont, northern Lombardy and the Veneto, Liguria, and northern Tuscany, producing cheap goods for popular markets in Italy and beyond. As the price of manufactured goods declined, something of a consumer revolution began to reach a large portion of the population, in central and northern Italy particularly.

RELIGION

The same secularizing trends at work north of the Alps began to weaken the monolithic nature of Tridentine Catholicism in the peninsula. In order to contest the challenges to their jurisdiction coming from France, Spain, and Austria, the popes gave new impetus to the study of church history, armed with the new tools of chronology and diplomatics. The unintended result was to have church scholars lead an assault on over a thousand years of church legends. A more critical form of erudition, a study of history, law, and institutions, made intellectual elites in Italy more suspicious of receiving tradition uncritically. After more than a century of active Counter-Reformation, the Italian clergy had never been so well educated or disciplined, but this meant that they were open to fresh intellectual currents, too. The church sometimes excoriated secular tendencies and arrested some of the early Freemasons (members of a philanthropical secret society who tolerated unorthodox religious views), but it could not reverse the trend. In the 1720s and 1730s Piedmont began to limit the church's jurisdiction, and took a more active role in education and charity, areas in which church institutions had been more active than the state. States began to invoke the need to appoint their own censors. Inquisition activities began to be curtailed, since they had always operated with the state's cooperation, and this was no longer automatically forthcoming. Italian states began to impose new taxes on church incomes, to reduce the tax immunities of clergymen, to reduce the number of priests and monks in their territories, and to abolish mortmain, which had prevented church land from being sold to secular landowners. Between 1750 and 1770 a spate of laws limiting the church's jurisdiction was issued all across Italy, sometimes accompanied by new concordats. Nevertheless, this did not entail the more profound dechristianization that was beginning in France. Popular attendance at church services was still very high everywhere. Over most of Italy, the late seventeenth and the entire eighteenth century witnessed missionary activity on an unprecedented scale over the entire countryside, instilling a more modern individual piety despite the theatrical flourishes typical of Mediterranean religiosity. If anything, the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented cultural gulf between urban cultural elites and the illiterate majority of Italians.

INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS

The intellectual dynamism in eighteenth-century Italy was considerable, across the gamut of genres. Increasing numbers of books were published in Italy, and ever more were imported, legally or as contraband. While censorship was still the norm, censors often intervened with a light hand. The church's index of prohibited books of 1758 was less severe than those preceding it, and was perhaps less severe than that of some Italian states. A great many forbidden works lined the bookshelves of Italian homes or libraries, often published in French. The publication of books was complemented by the multiplication of periodicals. While they rarely reached more than a couple of thousand subscribers each in northern and central Italy, they usually passed through more hands. These made known books published throughout Italy and the rest of Europe with very little time lag. Italian elites became conversant with French Enlightenment principles and with English ideas, too, spread by young aristocrats on the grand tour. By the 1760s and 1770s, the Italian authors who were members of academies and contributors to philosophical and literary journals began to disseminate their ideas close to the realm of power in Milan and Turin, Parma and Modena, Florence and Naples.

PIEDMONT

More often than not, Italian governments were friendly to such developments, which never encompassed much more than an urban elite. Many of the academies functioned with the blessing of princely governments. These governments evolved gradually in the direction of more discretionary power in the hands of the prince and his court, and a dwindling role for the noble heirs of the urban governments whose institutions reached back into the Middle Ages. The model was largely French, fashioned over several centuries by kings who gradually subjected great lords and autonomous regions to their authority. Piedmont applied these lessons most effectively with perfect continuity through the dukes of Savoy from Emanuel Philibert (ruled 1559–1580) onward. The house of Savoy domesticated its nobility by making service a condition of fiefholding. Nobles served in the army and at court, in both cases enhancing the power of the prince. Noblemen strove to be admitted to bureaucratic institutions in Turin. The dukes also adopted the French employment of powerful commissioners, called intendants, entrusted with the strict application of the duke's decisions in every district capital. With a more efficient government hierarchy, the dukes could afford to raise taxes and establish a standing army, which could be used to enforce its will on recalcitrant subjects. During the long reign of Victor Amadeus II (1683–1730), the duke single-mindedly pushed back provincial, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical privilege with the aim of increasing his revenues. These he spent principally on warfare. Aided by British and Dutch subsidies, Victor Amadeus fashioned a large and effective military force that helped tilt the balance against Louis XIV and resulted in the expansion of the state in Lombardy and the acquisition of Sardinia (1720) with its royal title. Along with Venice, but with more ambitious expansion aims, Piedmont possessed the only serious Italian army on the peninsula. By committing its army to one side or the other in the rivalry between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, the Savoy dynasty was able to increase the size and power of the state.

NAPLES

Piedmont was eventually isolated after 1756 once Habsburgs and Bourbons decided to make peace to confront other threats. Both dynasties applied absolutist principles in the Italian areas they governed, although these were not completely novel in the eighteenth century. The French Bourbon kings considered Italy to be a sideshow and did not seek major gains there during the eighteenth century. Their sole durable initiative was to purchase the rebellious island of Corsica from Genoa in 1767 and to crush the rebels there. Ejected from the peninsula after 1707, the Spanish Bourbons returned in 1734 when a seaborne army enabled the adolescent Charles III (ruled in Naples 1734–1759) to take Naples and Sicily from Austria. Charles was long dependent upon instructions from his parents, who gave him an army composed chiefly of Spanish and other foreign troops. True to Bourbon principles, Charles sought to domesticate the Neapolitan aristocracy and rule through civil servants steeped in royalist tradition. Charles was forced by family allegiance to commit the kingdom to war against the Habsburgs after 1740. With luck, his army defeated an Austrian attempt at reconquest in 1744, and Neapolitan notables resigned themselves to the Bourbon regime. The chief minister in Naples, Bernardo Tanucci (ascendant 1740–1776), adopted principles long followed in France, then Spain, to curtail baronial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions and liberties to the benefit of royal government, and to recover the direction of tax offices alienated to private investors during the preceding century. The place of the church was drastically curtailed during the latter half of the eighteenth century, in part due to a new concordat. Feudal power receded more gradually, though baronial excesses and violence were largely things of the past after 1750. There was even some progress in enhancing royal control over the tax machinery and in streamlining government procedures. After Tanucci retired, and the crown settled on Charles's son Ferdinand I (ruled 1767–1825) and his Habsburg queen Maria Carolina, absolutist policies designed by aristocratic Freemasons hemmed in baronial power in Sicily, too. The Bourbons tried to maintain a credible army and rally the aristocracy around it, and in the 1780s they created a navy, too, with which to combat Barbary corsairs. In Naples the regime established a panoply of royal institutions, including a palace at Caserta modeled on Versailles. The regime was fairly deeply rooted in the kingdom when French revolutionaries overthrew it in 1799, and it was restored largely through popular rebellion.

NORTHERN ITALY AND THE HABSBURGS

Austrian Habsburgs applied the same general principles in the areas they governed after winning the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. Initially they scooped up most of the Spanish territories in Italy: Milan, Naples, and Sardinia (exchanged with Piedmont for Sicily in 1720). Habsburg ambitions did not end there. Mantua was confiscated from the Gonzaga dukes for backing the Bourbons. The emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) also intended to incorporate into the empire the other Italian principalities: Parma on the extinction of the Farnese in 1731; Tuscany on the extinction of the Medici in 1737. Italians constituted about one-third of the emperor's direct subjects in those years.

But the incipient "Austrian" empire was a ramshackle conglomeration of territories articulated around the Austrian and Bohemian heartland, with its peripheries responding poorly to directives from the center. Its vulnerability in Italy was demonstrated during the War of the Polish Succession in 1733–1735 as Gallispan armies supported by Piedmont ejected imperial troops from both Lombardy and Naples, losing the latter definitively. When in 1740 a Prussian attack gave birth to a new coalition aimed at breaking up the Austrian Habsburg empire, triggering the War of the Austrian Succession, the new Habsburg regime headed by Maria Theresa had never looked weaker. The Danubian territories rallied around the dynasty, however, permitting the levy of new Habsburg armies for fighting in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. A new Spanish army operating in Emilia with Neapolitan support was beaten back. When Piedmont and Britain joined Austria soon after, the Habsburg Monarchy was able to mount better odds. Maria Theresa briefly lost Milan and Parma in 1745 to Gallispan troops but soon after recovered sufficiently to put the Bourbons on the defensive. French successes elsewhere finally allowed a Spanish Bourbon to become duke of Parma in 1748, but it was a limited success. Maria Theresa spent the rest of her reign reinforcing imperial institutions in Milan. As in Piedmont, the crucial initiative was to undertake a meticulous cadastre of landed property that allowed it to assess taxes more equitably and efficiently. Gradually, the monarchy took over the business of raising taxes, which was novel for the ancien régime. After 1765, Maria Theresa was aided by her eldest son, Joseph, who reigned as emperor between 1780 and 1790. As a result of their initiatives to stimulate the economy and streamline the administration, Milanese patricians gradually lost their hold over the region, to the benefit of Italians nominated from Vienna.

The Habsburg influence spread throughout Italy in the eighteenth century, prefiguring the predominance of Metternich's age in the early nineteenth century before Italian unification. Genoa relied on imperial troops to retain its shaky hold on Corsica. Maria Theresa's husband, emperor Francis I (ruled 1737–1765), succeeded the Medici to the grand-ducal throne of Florence, and ruled it from Vienna through the intermediary of Lorrainer officials, until his son Leopold (ruled 1765–1790) went to rule there directly after 1765. The Este line in Modena eventually merged with a Habsburg prince, extending Vienna's influence into Emilia. Once Habsburgs and Bourbons formed an alliance in 1756, it was cemented in place through a series of marriages, and queen Maria Carolina effectively brought Naples into the Austrian sphere of influence at the end of the century, displacing the Spanish connection of her Bourbon husband.

Habsburg reforms tended to be most drastic with respect to the Catholic Church. Maria Theresa was content to impose Vienna's jurisdiction in her territories, at the expense of the pope. It can be argued that she was following the Bourbon lead in this area, imposing ultimate state control over papal functionaries. Reforms to church structures under her sons Joseph II (in Lombardy and the Trentino) and Leopold (in Tuscany) were intentionally more fundamental, as both princes sponsored the spread of Jansenist principles at the expense of traditional Catholicism. Bishops nominated from Vienna were henceforth all selected with a view to uprooting "superstition" and "fanaticism." Priests were trained at great seminaries under state control, using a Jansenist catechism. The great majority of religious houses were closed by government order and their property confiscated. Most of these measures irritated most Italians, and the Tuscan reformers were challenged by traditional bishops and popular riots in 1787. Leopold decreed a pause in these and other reforms, but they marked the real end of the Counter-Reformation era in Italy, just before the arrival of French revolutionary troops in 1796.

See also Florence; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Habsburg Dynasty: Spain; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Papacy and Papal States; Savoy, duchy of; Venice.

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GREGORY HANLON