[1559 – 1814] Foreign Rule and the Enlightenment

Our story begins in 1559, not with a crescendo, but with a weary sigh of resignation. The cannons of the Italian Wars, which had torn the peninsula apart for over sixty years, had finally fallen silent. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis did not bring freedom, but a new, rigid order. Italy, the dazzling cradle of the Renaissance, the land of Leonardo and Michelangelo, was now largely a possession. The mighty Spanish Habsburg empire cast its long shadow over the land, directly ruling Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. The Pope in Rome and the Medici dukes in Florence knew well that their power existed only with Spain’s blessing. In this new landscape, only a few states clung fiercely to their independence: the maritime Republic of Venice, its gaze fixed eastward on its shrinking empire, and the rugged Duchy of Savoy, nestled in the Alps, learning to play the great powers of Europe against one another.

The vibrant spirit of the Renaissance city-states gave way to a somber, theatrical gravity. This was the age of the Baroque, an art of dramatic intensity, swirling movement, and profound emotion, perhaps a reflection of a society living under the strain of foreign domination. While architects like Bernini and Borromini sculpted Rome into a breathtaking spectacle of fountains and facades, the reality for most was far from splendid. Spanish viceroys, ruling from palaces in Milan and Naples, had one primary objective: to extract wealth from Italy to fund Spain’s endless wars across Europe. Taxes were heavy and cruelly levied, crippling local economies and widening the already present gap between a decadent, tax-exempt nobility and a desperately poor populace.

Life under the Spanish crown became a study in contrasts. A nobleman might spend his afternoon discussing poetry in a lavishly decorated palazzo, his silks rustling, while outside, peasants and artisans struggled under the weight of the grain tax, or 'gabella'. In the south, vast estates, the 'latifondi', were owned by absentee landlords, leaving the land and its people to stagnate. Discontent simmered just beneath the surface, occasionally boiling over. In 1647, the streets of Naples erupted in fury when a new tax on fruit was announced. A simple fisherman, Tommaso Aniello, known as Masaniello, led a massive revolt that briefly drove the Spanish from the city, a fiery but ultimately doomed testament to the people's suffering. An even more terrifying specter haunted this era: disease. The great plague of 1629–1631 swept through northern Italy, devastating cities. In Milan alone, the population was nearly halved, falling from 130,000 to just 65,000, leaving a legacy of horror immortalized in Alessandro Manzoni's great novel, 'The Betrothed'.

For over a century, this was Italy's reality. Then, at the dawn of the 18th century, the world shifted. The king of Spain died without an heir, plunging Europe into the War of the Spanish Succession. When the dust settled in 1713, the map of Italy was redrawn. The Spanish were out, but Italy was not free. The prize of Milan and Naples was simply passed to the other branch of the Habsburg family: the Austrians. It seemed like a mere changing of the guard, one foreign master for another. But from the coffeehouses of Milan and the universities of Naples, a new force was emerging, one that could not be dictated by treaties or controlled by viceroys: the power of ideas.

The Enlightenment, or 'Illuminismo' as it was known in Italy, swept through the peninsula’s intellectual circles. Thinkers began to question everything: the divine right of kings, the justice of the legal system, the role of the church. In Milan, now under a more forward-thinking Austrian administration, a group of brilliant minds gathered around a journal named 'Il Caffè' (“The Coffee House”). Among them was a young nobleman, Cesare Beccaria. In 1764, he published a short but explosive book, 'On Crimes and Punishments'. In it, he argued passionately that torture was barbaric and useless, and that the death penalty was an immoral act of state-sanctioned murder. His book became a sensation across Europe and America, influencing reformers from Frederick the Great in Prussia to Thomas Jefferson.

Some of Italy's new rulers were listening. In the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Habsburg Grand Duke Peter Leopold (brother of the Austrian Emperor) embarked on a radical program of reform. He streamlined the tax system, curbed the excesses of the clergy, and, in a move that stunned the world, officially abolished capital punishment on November 30, 1786, making Tuscany the first state in modern history to do so. While Milan and Florence buzzed with these new ideas, the Republic of Venice was living out its final, glorious chapter. The city of canals had become the playground of Europe, famous for its decadent Carnival, its masked balls, and the sublime music of Antonio Vivaldi. It was a beautiful, melancholic fantasy, a city dancing at the edge of a precipice, unaware that its thousand-year history was about to come to a sudden and brutal end.

In 1796, the storm broke. A young, fiercely ambitious French general crossed the Alps into Italy. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was nominally Italian himself, of Corsican descent, but he came as a conqueror. With lightning speed, his armies shattered the Austrian forces and tore apart the old, fragile order. The ancient states of Italy collapsed like houses of cards. In 1797, after more than a millennium of proud independence, the Republic of Venice surrendered without a fight. Napoleon was a whirlwind of creation and destruction. He swept away the old duchies and kingdoms, replacing them first with French-controlled “sister republics” and later with larger states under his direct control: the Kingdom of Italy in the north and the Kingdom of Naples in the south, which he gave to his brother to rule.

For Italians, the Napoleonic years were a profoundly mixed experience. The French looted priceless works of art, shipping masterpieces by Raphael and Titian to the Louvre in Paris. They imposed heavy taxes and, most hated of all, conscripted tens of thousands of young Italian men to fight and die in Napoleon’s wars, from the plains of Spain to the frozen steppes of Russia. Yet, this painful occupation came with a revolutionary inheritance. The French brought with them modern, centralized administration, a unified legal system in the Napoleonic Code, and new roads and schools. They broke the suffocating power of the old, stagnant nobility.

Most importantly, however, Napoleon unwittingly gave the Italians the most powerful idea of all: the idea of 'Italy'. For the first time in centuries, men from Lombardy, the Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna were fighting in the same army, under a single flag—a new green, white, and red 'tricolore' inspired by the French. They were no longer just Milanese or Venetians; they were soldiers of the Kingdom of Italy. A shared consciousness, a nascent nationalism, was forged in the heat of these campaigns. The word “Italy,” for so long a mere geographic expression, began to represent a nation, a people, a destiny.

In 1814, Napoleon’s empire crumbled. He was defeated and exiled. At the Congress of Vienna, the great powers of Europe tried to put Italy back together as it had been, restoring the old monarchs and reaffirming Austrian dominance over the peninsula. It was a restoration, an attempt to turn back the clock and erase the memory of the past twenty-five years. But it was too late. The seeds of change had been planted. The ideas of unified laws, rational government, and, above all, national identity, had taken root. The curtain fell on the long era of foreign rule, but the stage was now set for a new drama: the tumultuous, heroic, and bloody struggle to create a single, free, and united Italy.