Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Some light marking on cover and spine due to age See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The Course Team has not allotted a particular point for your study of the History Unit; I suggest that you read it as back-up material as you work through the course. You may like to read it through quickly while you are studying Units 1 and 2 as these deal with Rome Florence and Venice but you will want to return to it in more detail later. At various points in the units you will find suggestions as to when the History Unit is particularly apposite but it is largely up to you when you choose to study it. If you studied A201 Renaissance and Reformation you may wish to refer back to the components on Florence Machiavelli the Reformation and the Counter- Reformation in that course for additional information and for amplification of points made during this unit. During the Middle Ages the long struggle between the emperors and the papacy left the way open for the growth of numerous independent communes or city states in Italy especially in the north. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these city states were in fact oligarchic republics: that is they were governed by small self-perpetuating elites. But the fourteenth century saw these small city republics racked by the internecine struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and also by the emergence ‘class’ warfare. In the face of chaos arbitrary one-man government seemed to offer the only remedy. On occasion an invitation was extended to such a ruler; on occasion power was seized. The outstanding example of the seizure of power by an individual was in Milan. In 1277 a Visconti became ruler of the city-state and very soon after he received the recognition of the Emperor as Duke of Milan. The Visconti remained in control from 1277 until 1447 and the tradition of one-man rule became so entrenched that an attempt to revive the old republic in 1447 failed and Francesco Sforza successfully usurped the ducal office. He was followed by Lodovico Sforza (nicknamed ‘II Moro’) who made Milan perhaps the most brilliant court in late fifteenth-century Europe. In Florence the domination of government by one dynasty was rather less spectacular but no less real in the fifteenth century. From 1424 until 1494 the Medici a banking family were in control. But in Florence the republican tradition was more recent and stronger than it had been in Milan perhaps because the Medici had used rather than subdued the republican ideal and the last years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth century saw experiments in republican rule in the city. (LL)