10 - The Emotions of the State: A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language (Mid-Fourteenth-Mid- Fifteenth Centuries)

Summary

Although emotions as a field of historical research have come to the fore since the late 1990s, the interest aroused by this subject among the scholars of the Italian Renaissance state has been limited, at least so far. Apart from an important study on Lombard factions by Marco Gentile, and the very recent insight of Isabella Lazzarini into the Florentine diplomatic records, nothing else has been published.

On these grounds I have decided to take up some suggestions coming from scholars of other periods of the Middle Ages to analyze the case study of the duchy of Milan from the angle of the relationship between politics and emotions. Unlike Isabella Lazzarini, I am not going to predominantly focus on diplomatic records, which also represent an extraordinary source for the duchy of Milan; I am more interested in probing into the relations between governors and governed – between the duke and his subjects.

In order to appreciate the distinctive features of the latter, it is probably necessary to take the former as a starting point, to have a term of comparison. Therefore let us have a very quick look at the language of diplomatic practice and its emotional register.

Since the beginning of their rise to power in the first half of the 14^th century, the Visconti deployed emotionality in their diplomatic correspondences. Politics was, and still is, the art of persuading, so it is hardly surprising that foreign affairs were edged by the Visconti's chancellors within the framework of friendship/enmity, love/hatred, or happiness/sadness. Let us consider first a letter sent by Galeazzo II to Ludovico Gonzaga and brothers, lords of Mantua in 1366. It concerns a very minor subject, the Visconti laments the bad treatment received in Mantua by a merchant from Monza, but in its very ordinariness rests its significance:

Magnifici fratres carissimi (= close familiarity). Mercatores nostri Modoetie nuper coram nobis lacrimabiliter sunt conquesti (= sadness and complaint) … die quarto seu quinto mensis instantis ipsa mercimonia conductoribus eorum fuerunt per vestros super teritorio vestro Mantuae nequiter derobate et in civitate Mantue violenter conducte (= frustrated rage).