SIGNORIES AND PRINCIPALITIES. - The two words, and especially the first, indicate two things linked to one another but in reality quite distinct, namely the new monarchical form which the communal government of many Italian cities assumed from the middle of the 13th century, and together the corresponding period of Italian history down to the loss of independence. Through this new monarchical form the communal constitution is emptied of real authority and effective power is gathered into the hands of one man, at first in temporary and extraordinary form, then for life, and finally by inheritance. Once this last phase is reached, the signoria seeks to legitimize its own authority, outside of the original popular election, by resorting to imperial conceptions which end by constituting a principality of a feudal type. The signoria is the fatal evolution of the commune, owing to the inadequacy of its institutions to maintain internal peace and to curb the violence of the struggles among families, parties and classes which tend to dominate the city alone to the detriment of their adversaries, who are often expelled. This harshness of internal struggles intensifies with the broadening of the political base of the commune and the participation of new strata of the population in government, and is aggravated by external threat, when the guerrilla warfare of the exiles relies on the aid of neighbouring and rival cities. Then the gravity of the danger makes necessary the action of a leader as in any form of war; and the leader exercises it in defense of the party he has led to victory. The pressure of external enemies and the plots of internal ones, when they fail to overturn this situation, contribute to broadening the leader's powers and finally to giving them legality through the conferral of a title that qualifies his function, and through decrees that fix his authority, soon unlimited.
This origin of the principal lordships, in the function of defending an internal situation, excludes violence and personal intrigue, insofar as the leader's work, certainly ambitious, merges with the interests of the strongest party. The phenomenon begins around the middle of the 13th century owing to the sharpening of the internal struggles of the cities during and because of the conflict between Frederick II and the Communes, and its first signs are seen in the popular and Guelph element, for example, in Milan when the della Torre often became elders of the Credenza di S. Ambrogio only to be overthrown in 1278 by the nobles and Ghibellines who acclaimed as lord the archbishop Ottone Visconti. The same Guelph element, driving out Salinguerra, head of the opposing party, brought back, with Venetian help, to Ferrara in 1240 Azzo VII d'Este, who until his death would have a strong pre-eminence, while the title of lord was instead given to his nephew Obizzo (1264). Prior to this there would be the lordship of Ezzelino da Romano over Verona (1232) and then Vicenza and Padua, a lordship which, in fact, rested on the forces of the emperor Frederick II, who thus wanted the route to Germany secure. Only after his death does the free play of internal forces unfold, which soon give themselves a leader in Mastino della Scala, and upon his death (1277), to his brother Alberto, elected to succeed him, was given the title of captain and rector of the gastaldioni of the Guilds and of the people of Verona, which indicated that he was to defend the predominance of the people organized in the Guilds against the old exiled families.
The lordship in every city where it arose had various origins, according to local conditions, but everywhere the need for peace was common, even if through the expulsion of opponents and the tenacious struggle to keep them far away: a consequence of that spirit of intolerance and monopoly of political liberty for one's own party, peculiar to the Middle Ages and the communal age, in which the identity of the party with the commune is often affirmed ("quae pars est Comune"). Sometimes indeed the office of lord is masked with the title of "conservator of the peace" given at Bologna to Taddeo Pepoli (1337). In relations with the commune it is logical that the lordship should allow Councils, magistracies and even patrimonial individuality to continue to exist; and its creation and succession is legitimized by an election, even if sometimes it follows an initial proclamation to which arms have contributed. Among the first faculties granted to the lord is arbitrary power and bailia, that is, a power superior to the constitution, a power of which the new lord only slowly makes use, availing himself rather of skillful and less conspicuous forms. The prolongation of the lordship is due to the gathering around the lord of the interests of persons and families fearful of suffering, from the succession of outsiders or the return of the communal regime, grave harm to their position and interests, so that the popular election, always a matter of rite, is little more than a formality, unless a crisis of the lordship is underway and the election can give occasion for discontent to manifest itself; but often the lord avoided this danger by associating with himself while alive his son as heir, by means of an anticipated election. The beginning of the lordship, however, is exposed to a grave internal danger on the part of the lord's old companions, who ill tolerate that the function, attributed to their leader only to defend the common victory, should slowly transform into a personal or family privilege that raises him and detaches him from his old companions. But against the dangerous popular origin, the lord seeks guarantee with a legitimization of his authority in an imperial vicariate (papal in the Papal State). The office of imperial vicar then granted a power superior to local laws and therefore the right to modify the communal statutes, a faculty already granted in the arbitrium, but always used with much prudence. The title of vicar, arisen already at the end of the 13th century, became with Henry VII and his successors a necessary complement of the lordship, and, for various reasons, common in the 14th century. From the vicariate to the principality there was but a step, all the more so since in Piedmont lordships of feudal origin still endured (Savoy, Monferrato, Saluzzo): Louis the Bavarian had already created Castruccio duke of Lucca, but the decisive fact was the transformation of the Visconti lordship in 1395 into the Duchy of Milan: thus slowly, for reasons of prestige and vanity, the various lordships of northern Italy obtained titles of dukes, marquises and counts, paying well for them to the Emperor, who had long been selling to burghers minor titles of feudal nobility. Thus the old lord, who already commands by his own effective authority, now legally governs in the duchy or marquisate by imperial concession. When Italy has in fact eliminated the Empire from its life, there is the fiction that the new Italian princes of the north exercise a legitimate authority only because invested by the Emperor: a fiction that would become fatal when Charles V would assert these imperial rights, which seemed emptied of value.
A somewhat different process follows the formation of the lordship in a city like Florence, where the broader and deeper development of the communal regime and of the Guilds, and the powerful mercantile life delayed this evolution by more than a century, because the need for internal peace, of unity and continuity in foreign policy, in moments of crisis was provided for, in the first half of the 14th century, with Angevin vicariates, which left internal autonomy intact. When, however, the Duke of Athens (already an Angevin regent, elected in a moment of grave crisis) exceeded these limits, he was driven out by the whole city in revolt (1343). Once the Angevin Kingdom had declined, Florence supplied, from 1382, the need for concentration of authority and for continuity with a tight mercantile oligarchy in which power was in very few hands. But this lordship, masked behind the communal fiction, requires men of exceptional quality; when they are lacking, the regime falls apart and in their place rises Cosimo de' Medici, in the name of the popular party, without the struggles and blood of the northern cities; but he too must maintain the republican fiction, which will slowly be suppressed, but not without the possibility of reawakening, by his grandson Lorenzo.
Having examined the internal aspect of the signorie, there remains the other aspect, that of external relations, which give the historical period its very physiognomy, merging with the general tendencies of Italian life such as: the decline of the two universal authorities, Empire and Papacy, and the consequent autonomy of Italian politics; the tendency toward a reorganization of the old feudal Kingdom into vast regional states that would lead to a kind of political equilibrium among the states themselves. Now, the organization of the signorie has a close connection with this tendency, because by constituting a stronger government it reinforced that need for expansion already manifested in the commune, soon directed at subjugating the contado and, after that, contiguous territories, land and river routes that could have economic and military importance, especially by seeking to forestall neighboring cities — a fact that gives occasion to most of the struggles among the cities themselves, due not to ideologies but to concrete interests. On the other hand, also in relations with the Empire and the Papacy, it is the solidity of internal government that causes the signorie, even those Ghibelline in name, to show themselves so independent against Charles IV, so that nothing remained for him but to exploit the Guelph communes. This evolution of Italian politics toward real independence is largely the fruit of the power attained by the principal signorie which, absorbing the lesser cities, are reorganizing the old Kingdom into vast states, followed in this direction by the surviving communes, which ended up being dominated by oligarchies that ensured continuity and firmness of government: Venice first of all and then also Florence. Comparing the political geography of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century with that of its end, it appears how far this territorial and political reorganization has advanced, which will find its definitive form in the fifteenth century: between the two centuries, however, there is this difference, that in the first there is still the possibility, or at least the illusion, of the creation of a great hegemonic state in the north, but after the crisis of the Duchy of Milan at the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, during which the Venetian mainland dominion is formed, and the development of the Florentine and Savoyard states, this design is impossible, and, after half a century of struggles, in the Peace of Lodi (1454) the political equilibrium created by circumstances imposes itself. During these two centuries, the importance of the southern Kingdom passes into the background, which under Charles of Anjou seemed about to resume the ambitious designs of Frederick II; the wound inflicted on it by the Sicilian Vespers, the state of almost continuous war between the two Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and the dynastic struggles in the former, paralyze every ambition of its sovereigns. Through these conflicts foreign domination insinuates itself into the Mezzogiorno, first in Sicily and then in Naples, which by this route will ascend the peninsula as far as Milan. Only the internal problems occupying France and Spain delay until the end of the century that foreign invasion which will put an end to Italian independence. Of this danger only the most acute men, Francesco Sforza above all and Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, are conscious and seek to save the equilibrium despite the constant discord of the Italian states. When the accord among Milan, Florence and Naples was broken by the presumptuous and murky politics of Ludovico il Moro and by the recklessness of the son and successor of Lorenzo de' Medici, with Venice viewed with disfavor by all on suspicion that she aspired to new expansions, there was in Italy no political and military force capable of arresting that invasion which had been preparing beyond the Alps.
These two centuries, politically little fortunate, are on the other hand glorious for the splendors of the literary and artistic Renaissance, which finds its greatest expression in the capitals of the new states and among the princes who are their generous patrons, especially in Florence and Rome, as well as in Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, Naples. Despite these splendors, the Italian economy from the mid-fourteenth century tends to halt and to fall back, especially in the banking field, because of the competition that arose abroad and the damages of the Turkish advance in the East.