The State and Shepherds: Foundations for the Neapolitan Renaissance

Echoing the title of one of John Marino’s early articles, this paper analyzes his wide-ranging body of work that ardently sustained a project of radical reinterpretation of the history of the Kingdom of Naples, and especially its capital city, as a vibrant, successful example of an early modern society, which has long been misunderstood by the canonical interpretation of Benedetto Croce that depicted the Kingdom as a decadent backwater because of Spanish colonization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Marino would have none of that. By making judicious comparisons he demonstrated that, in fact, Naples was no more tyrannized by a closed, selfish aristocracy than was Venice, so famous for its republican “liberties.” The neighborhoods and economic networks of Naples contributed to community cohesion no less than in the north Italian communes. He demonstrated that the southern economy was no more dominated by vertical ties of clientage, which many scholars have depicted as a source of corruption that inhibited economic development, than it was of horizontal ties of mutual cooperation. The pastoral economy thrived on a social code of fede (trust), no less so than Florentine neighbors or Venetian politicians. In other words, social capital was just as much the cement of society in the “feudal” south as it was in the “communal” north of Italy. The sum of his work shows that until the middle of the seventeenth century when exogenous crises diminished the city’s size and stature, Naples was a major European capital, the largest city in Europe and in the vast Spanish empire, an economic powerhouse that was far more important that puny Florence, which has received so much attention from historians. Until John Marino Naples got a raw deal from historians.