1 - The Uses of the Law

Summary

This chapter explores the ways in which law and violence were co-ordinates in the pursuit of everyday enemies. Contrary to what we might expect from Europe’s most civilised region, early modern Italy experienced rates of violence that were far higher than its neighbours. The problem was not due to lawlessness. Italy’s highly developed legal systems and bureaucratic mechanisms of state control were widely admired by contemporaries. There was not too little bureaucracy and litigation but rather too much. It remains commonplace to ascribe the early modern Italian problem of violence to a variety of cultural reasons, a hangover from the Middle Ages, a consequence of the climate or the product of so-called ‘Mediterranean’ values. But vendettas were neither inevitable nor interminable. Late medieval cities developed a panoply of judicial and extrajudicial forums for settling disputes and the ideals of police and good government were medieval in origin. This chapter takes a closer look at how the law and legal system shaped vendetta.