Italian City States
Italian City States
The Italian city states gradually developed their own bureaucratic structures,
which included nascent diplomatic representations. As part of those, already
from medieval times, Italian princes had created rudimentary secret services.
Paolo Preto, for instance, mentions the existence of an ‘ufficiale sopra le spie’ in
Pisa, already from 1297.
Our knowledge of the Italian city states’ secret services
is limited, primarily emanating from scholarship on diplomatic and cultural
history that explores the information and news networks of princes and their
formal envoys.
In consequence, historians and readers are faced with ‘the perennial problem of those engaged in espionage—how to sift the useful intelligence
from the international chatter of news and rumour, propaganda and gossip’.
Ultimately, however, rumour, propaganda, and gossip were integral constituents
of early modern intelligence.
The duchy of Milan was one of the best-informed city states in the late medieval
period. Especially under Francesco Sforza (1401–66), “the ‘signore di novelle’ par
excellence,” Milan developed an efficient network of diplomats and intelligence
gatherers aspiring to make Francesco the ‘maestro’ of news.
A cerebral man and
a bona fide condottiere, Szorza had assimilated the value of maintaining a robust
network of informers, whom he installed in the principal Italian cities, in order to
receive intelligence vital to his domestic and foreign policies.
Compared to the more rigid diplomatic systems of other Italian city states,
Milanese envoys operated with a substantial degree of flexibility.⁷⁵ Their primary
responsibility was the collection of information that would help ‘defend the
authority and honour of the duke’.
For this reason, one of their priorities,
when they assumed their diplomatic mission in foreign courts, was to consort
with ‘friends’ who would supply them with well-founded intelligence. The friends’
reimbursement was in the form of gifts and favours conferred by the duke.
Francesco Sforza was also responsible for the development of a meticulous secret
chancery that was headed by Cicco Simonetta, a long-serving Secretary of State
and one of the first professional cryptologists to be employed in a state administration.
Probably under his direction not only Milan did pioneer the systematic
use of clandestine modes of communication, but the numerous ciphers of the
Milanese secret chancery were methodically ordered and classified for the benefit
of Sforza diplomats and military governors.
After the death of Francesco II Sforza (1508–35), the duchy of Milan reverted to the Holy Roman Emperor’s
feudal overlordship.
Florence’s intelligence and espionage network was systematically developed
by Cosimo I (1519–74), the founder of the grand ducal dynasty of Tuscany,
when, as a 17-year-old, he was handpicked by Charles V to succeed the assassinated Alessandro de’ Medici to the ducal throne of Florence.
Paolo Preto has
argued that late Renaissance Florence’s intelligence network resembled greatly
that of Venice and other larger European states.
Lack of systematic research on
Florence’s intelligence pursuits, however, does not permit corroboration of this
claim. Scattered information emanating from contemporaneous reports points to
the fact that Florence was enveloped in a pervasive aura of espionage due to the
astonishing number of mercenary spies and informers whose role was to notify
the duke of anything that could pose a threat to his power.
How their work was
overseen and managed is still unknown.
What we know from Cosimo’s coevals is
the astonishing sums of money he spent on information-gathering and espionage.
Specifically, in his relazione (end-of-service report) to the Senate in 1561, Vicenzo
Fedeli, the Venetian ambassador to Florence, reported that Cosimo disbursed an
annual sum of 40,000 ducats on spies, spreading fear amongst the inhabitants of
the Tuscan capital, who had to be extremely vigilant of how they spoke about the
duke.
Aside from paid informers, the Florentine intelligence apparatus relied heavily on the use of avvisi—or newsletters—that enabled Florentine
ambassadors to keep abreast of international affairs.
Genoa, Venice’s perennial commercial rival in the Italian peninsula, emulated
the Venetian model of the Inquisitors of the State to create a sort of secret police.
The Genoese Inquisitori di Stato—a committee of six citizens and one senator—
were established nearly one century after their Venetian counterparts, in 1628,
following a failed conspiracy orchestrated by Giulio Cesare Vachero to overthrow
Genoa’s oligarchy.
Their primary intention was to safeguard the security of the
Genoese Republic against its potential arch-enemies. Rapidly, Genoa turned into
a surveillance state, where omnipresent spies and informers kept watch for
anything suspicious.
To mitigate the danger of overthrow, citizens were banned
from frequenting the residences of foreign envoys in the city, a rule that, as we
shall see in the following chapter, had been initiated by the Venetians.
Yet the
lack of an institution such as the Council of Ten, the ‘vero “padrone”’ of the
Venetian Republic, was the object of several debates in Genoa and, in a way,
superseded all the similarities between the Genoese and the Venetian intelligence
systems.
As the Italian city states entered a phase of gradual decline in the late sixteenth
century, the Vatican started gaining momentum as the pinnacle of bureaucratic
and state innovation.
This is not accidental, since the Catholic Church has been
strongly associated with the rise of the information state, and eventually created
a composite civil service and one of the early modern world’s most structured
information systems.
Yet, despite its robust bureaucracy, papal Rome did not
create a centrally organized intelligence apparatus. Its sprawling geographical
reach played a pivotal role in this lacuna, as managing intelligence operations
that spanned the Far East and the New World, where there was substantial
pontifical influence, was extremely challenging for the period. The absence of a
systematized papal intelligence service, however, was alleviated by the surplus of
informants who stemmed, primarily, from the ranks of religious missionaries and
papal delegates who were scattered around the early modern world.
More specifically, the plethora of religious missions charged with spreading the
Catholic rite in all corners of the globe spawned a surplus of informers gathering intelligence for the Pope.
The most systematically organized amongst them, the
Jesuits, had even developed their own ciphers for the protection of their written
communications. Moreover, just as in other early modern states, Vatican grandees, such as bishops and ambassadors, would keep themselves apprised of
current and secret affairs through their own—at times paid—informers, such
as Baron Taxis, the Holy Roman Emperor’s postmaster.
Amongst them, the
nuncio in Venice was considered to be one of the Pope’s most hallowed informants. The nuncio not only employed his own spies who supplied him with vital
intelligence, but also was ordered to keep his eyes open for spies ‘against
Christianity’, of whom, as he once reported to the Vatican, there was an infinite
number in Venice, especially stemming from four ‘founts’—the Germans, the
Greeks, the Jews, and the Turks, who ‘cannot produce anything but cloudy
water’.
Overall, the composite pontifical information network, which extended beyond
conventional diplomatic frameworks, was expected to keep a close watch on
Italian and European affairs and the military manoeuvres of the Ottoman
Empire.
For this reason, diplomatic relations with the Venetian Republic became
the mainstay of the papal information service, and the apostolic nunciature of
Venice turned into a prime information centre for the Vatican.
The Holy See,
however, was not the only early modern power that relied on the Republic of Saint
Mark for monitoring the information flow between the East and the West.
With
an analogously far-reaching geographical grip and parallel intelligence interests,
Philip II’s tightly controlled and centrally administered espionage network contrasted with the ‘organic’ Papal intelligence-gathering system, where ecclesiastical
delegates exercised substantial authority over the spy webs they created.
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