| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

William J. Connell. La città dei crucci: Fazioni e clientele in uno stato repubblicano del '400. Florence: Nuova Toscana. 2000. Pp. x, 318. L. 30,000.

This book by William J. Connell is in effect a commentary on Niccolò Machiavelli's famous dictum that in Florence's attempt to avoid a reputation for cruelty it allowed Pistoia to destroy itself by faction. Between 1499 and 1502, the Cancellieri and Panciatichi factions waged a civil war for control of Pistoia and its institutions. Florentine attempts to mediate the conflict came to nothing. Repression, in Machiavelli's view, would have cost fewer lives. But Connell argues that things were not so simple: Pistoian factions were intimately tied to Florence's own internal politics. Connell explores these factions and their Florentine connections from the fourteenth-century incorporation of Pistoia into the Florentine state to the sixteenth-century suppression of Pistoian factions by Duke Cosimo I. 1

The problem of factional violence extends back at least to the famous Blacks and Whites, whose bitter struggles in the early fourteenth century were exported throughout Tuscany. After integrating Pistoia into the Florentine state, the Florentines initially tried to deal with the two major Pistoian factions—the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi—by assuring that public offices would be split evenly between the two groups. Ironically, one effect was that Pistoian factions tended to ally themselves with their Florentine peers. In effect, the Albizzi of Florence and the Panciatichi of Pistoia faced the Medici and the Cancellieri. The Pistoian and Florentine factions eventually were linked by all the formal and informal ties so well documented in Florence: marriage, political office, property, loans, friendships, and ecclesiastical benefices. . . .

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