Italy in the 1640s
It could well be said that the Romans, in regard to the War of the Roman Succession and the Italian Peninsula, won the war but lost the peace. The 1644 expedition, where the Sicilians went it alone with the Latin allies but without the Romans, is a good illustration. While the initial disagreements between Constantinople and Messina had been bandaged up, the wounds would not heal without scarring. Sicilian efforts to improve direct relations with Arles and Spain were a result of this wariness.
Some Romans would complain about this, perceiving this as Sicilian ingratitude for the territorial gains they’d made in Italy. However those territorial gains had only exacerbated this issue. Sicily was a mixed state, with a large Greek-speaking Orthodox element, significant in the upper and mercantile classes. However it had a majority that was Italian-speaking (various dialects notwithstanding) and Catholic, which still had substantial elements in the upper and mercantile classes as well. The Sicilians were careful to always present the Greek face when looking to Constantinople, but at least 60% and likely more of the pre-war Sicilian population was Catholic.
The Greek Orthodox element skewed bigger because of its prominence in the upper tiers of society, but even here it was not unchallenged before the war. But after the war the element’s dominance was weakened even more than it already was, for all of the new holdings were Italian-speaking Catholic. As a result, Sicily left the war as more of a Latin Catholic state and society than it had been before the war, which naturally weakened its ties with Rhomania.
Furthermore increasing trade with Spain and Arles, especially after the corsair threat was lessened, was to the benefit of Palermo and Naples. Palermo was a mixed city religiously and linguistically while Naples was wholly Latin and Catholic. This gave them more economic weight in the politics of the Despotate, at the expense of the ports of Messina and Bari, which were mostly Greek-speaking and Orthodox.
To the north lay the Roman enclave around Rome, the existence of which was more of a sop to Roman vanity than of economic value. The city of Rome had little in the way of industry and most of its allure had been based on the presence of the papal curia. The Popes and Cardinals and all their retainers and hangers-on, plus all the bureaucrats and clerics, had to be housed and fed and dressed and feted. Without those, business dried up.
The Orthodox Patriarch of Rome and his staff hardly made up the difference. The pilgrim trade also dried up. Many of the most significant relics had been spirited out of the city by the Catholic faithful, Catholic faithful were wary of undertaking pilgrimage to a heretic city, and Orthodox faithful preferred the familiar Constantinople and Jerusalem routes.
Thus the Eternal City decayed to a sleepy settlement of 15,000, repeatedly blasted by waves of malaria. The Patriarch of Rome, for health reasons, rarely resided in the city, and the wealthy always vacated the city during the summer. Its only real draw was its many ancient monuments which attracted antiquarians as well as artists, who were struck by the sight of humble Umbrian shepherds guiding their flocks through the remains of the palaces of emperors. But these numbered in the dozens compared to the thousands of pilgrims who’d once flocked to the city when the Pontiff made it his residence.
Continuing north is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which is certainly no sleepy undeveloped tract of countryside with only memories of past glories to warm its aching bones. Firenze recovers rapidly from its wartime troubles, once again heavily involved in textile manufacturing, glassblowing, financiering, and art. Livorno continues its wartime boom, now because Grand Duke Galilei turns it into a free port, bringing much trade and traders to the port.
While it does create much prosperity for Livorno and the parts of Tuscany that import and export via Livorno, which was Galilei’s goal, there is a sting in the tail, one Romans are not surprised to see coming. It leads also to the creation of a powerful clique of Livornese merchants who, growing used to being left alone, strongly resent any curb on their moneymaking and prove to be a massive political problem for future Grand Dukes who wish to do some curbing. (This is why economic pro-free trade arguments do nothing for most Romans, as they recognize, unlike most economists, that economic issues such as this are rarely just economic issues.)
Galileo Galilei is personally friendly to Constantinople as he is an honest man, meaning that once bought he stays bought. Starting in 1640, his daughter Celeste spends much of her time in Constantinople, personally tutoring Athena in astronomy and the use of the telescope. The telescope personally constructed by Celeste and used by Athena in some of these lessons is today on display in the Imperial Museum of Science. Celeste also oversees renovations and improvements to the Imperial observatory and corresponds regularly with Roman intellectuals on astronomical and related topics, a respected figure in the intelligentsia.
However that is a personal connection and not enough to counteract other, more impersonal, forces. Tuscany is an Italian-speaking Catholic country, and it is on the west coast of Italy. Livorno faces west toward Spain and Arles. While Roman and Sicilian merchants are active in the free port of Livorno, Spanish and Arletian ones handily outnumber them. Roman trade boomed here when the Romans controlled the port, but with a legally level playing field, geographical proximity proves key. Galilei’s personal feelings aside, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany decidedly leans westward, not east.
The Romagna might be expected to be different, because it is on the east coast proximate to Rhomania. But the geographical, personal, and cultural factors play differently, yet result in a similar result to Tuscany. The inhabitants of the Romagna are considered to be xenophobic and chauvinistic even by Italian standards, and they intensely and fiercely resent a Greek Orthodox ruler being imposed on them.
Theodoros of Nineveh is hardly the type to overcome such initial antipathy. Mild-mannered and interested in chemistry, he is not the type to win over embittered Romagnol notables and townspeople. Out of grudging politeness for Roman power they won’t kill him or ride him out of the country back to his own barbarian kind as they would like, but that’s the extent of it.
His wife Isabella of Portugal, an illegitimate daughter of King Ferdinand of Spain, fares much better. She is a Spanish Catholic, which is not nearly as good as being a Romagnol, but it’s far better than being a Greek Orthodox. That she is less overtly imposed on them by outside powers also helps. She is also better looking than the plain Theodoros, which always helps, and she much more quickly and proficiently masters the Romagnol Italian. As a result she is openly given more attention, love, and respect by the people of the Romagna, the snubbing of Theodoros and Romans their way of protesting their treatment. Furthering closer ties with Spain, coordinated through Isabella once she is older (she is far more politically astute than her husband), is also a way for the Romagnol elite to avoid the region falling into Roman orbit.
In the Kingdom of Lombardy the situation is generally quiet during the early 1640s, with efforts focusing on recovering from the devastation of the war, with some success. Despite the stripping of much of its moveable wealth, Milan is a large and developed city, a center of manufacturing by the European standards of the day.
Yet for all the attentions modern historians lavish on trade and manufacturing, it is agriculture that is the base of pre-industrial society, upon which everything depends and without which nothing can be done. The mid-1640s see the bottom fall out of Italian agriculture.
In 1644 drought causes the harvest in Lombardy to fail. The damage that year, while hard, is not too devastating by itself, with reserves and shipments from Sicily cushioning some of the blow. During the early 1600s, the island of Sicily with its volcanic soils has become an important breadbasket, with wheat and barley yields that are the highest in all of Christendom, with wheat at 7-10 grains harvested per grain sown, and barley at 9-11. However those high yields are dependent on a benevolent and cooperative climate which was already fading in the early 1640s. Marginal lands, cultivated to take advantage of the grain boom of earlier years, in the early 1640s were seeing yields as low as 1:3, before the collapse. [1]
The next year, 1645, is when the real crash happens. Torrential rains sweep Sicily, ruining the harvest, with an eruption of Mt. Etna compounding the damage. Sicily can’t produce enough food to feed itself, let alone support Lombardy, which is ironically still suffering from drought. Because there’s not enough irony around, in 1646 the rains dissipate and now Sicily is afflicted by its own drought, which ruins that year’s harvest as well as 1647’s. All of Italy by this point is suffering similar plights to Sicily’s, although areas that had become used to drawing on Sicily’s bounty during their times of dearth are hit the hardest.
Horsemen of the Apocalypse rarely ride by themselves and by 1648 plague has added itself to the list. The likely source is Germany, with Italian mercenaries returning home to enlist new recruits for their companies, as well as substantial trade through the Alpine passes; Milanese armaments are an important component of the fighting in Germany. Bubonic plague chews its way through the peninsula, hammering a population already weakened by malnourishment.
Famine and plague working together reap a bountiful harvest, unlike the unfortunate Italians, from the Lombards in the north to the Sicilians in the south. By 1651, Italy’s population is one-fourth less than what it was a mere seven years earlier. The only consolation, and it is not much of one, is that the Italians would be far from alone in their laments.
[1] This is from OTL. See Geoffrey Parker,
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, pg. 687.
