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Bureaucracy and Social Welfare in the Renaissance: A Florentine Case Study

Some thirty years ago, Federico Chabod wrote a paper with the provocative title: "Was There a Renaissance State?"1 After rejecting most of the arguments that had been advanced by scholars who, like Burckhardt, had seen clear evidence of the emergence of the modem state in Renaissance Italy, Chabod focused on the formation of bureaucratic structures and mentalities as the most significant contribution of Renaissance governments to modern state structures. His examples were drawn largely from the Milanese state in the sixteenth century, but he insisted that the administrative system of the Hapsburg regime in Milan had counterparts in other European governments. If Chabod's essay was an invitation to scholars to pursue the study of those structures in the Renaissance period, it failed in its purpose. The research on the Milanese administration by Caterina Santoro and by Chabod himself has not been sustained by a younger generation of scholars, nor has much work been done on the subject in other Italian cities.2 It is noteworthy that the multivolume Storia d'Italia, published recently by Einaudi, does not contain a chapter on the development of bureaucracy for any period of the peninsula's history.3 The complex structure of civic offices in the Florentine republic has been studied, although unsystematically, by historians of that city. Scholars have focused primarily on officeholding as a dimension of political power; they have been less interested in its functional aspects. As was true of