State Responses to the Collapse of Civil Order: an Italian Example

Abstract

After 1560, the Papal States in central Italy were engulfed in an upsurge of urban and rural violence tied to a sharp increase in clan warfare, lethal new weaponry, and general rebellion against centralizing authority. By the late 1570s, the rule of law had largely disappeared from much of the Papal territories. This paper examines the (often unsuccessful) responses attempted by a succession of popes, applied with increasing ferocity against their subjects. In the process, it also explores the contrasting nature of state and private violence, both in a pre-modern and a present-day context, and traces the roots of some of the more extreme methods of repression that we tend to associate with the twentieth rather than the sixteenth century.