A Treatise on Abundance (1638) and Early Modern Views on Poverty and Famine

By Carlo Tapia and Tommaso Astarita

‘A “Treatise on Abundance” (1638) and Early Modern Views of Poverty and Famine’ is an edited English translation of Carlo Tapia’s ‘Trattato dell’abondanza’. First published in Naples in 1638, the treatise offered the earliest systematic attempt to develop and publicize the most effective tools available to governments to fight famine and poverty. In particular, Tapia moved the discussion of these issues away from traditional religious approaches and aimed instead to offer a theoretical understanding of the issues—based in part on his study of both classical sources and contemporary legal theories—and practical advice that could help administrators in the provinces and in the capital.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089604

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A Treatise on Abundance (1638) and Early Modern Views on Poverty and Famine

Economic Ideas that Built Europe

Economic Ideas that Built Europe reconstructs the development of European political economy as seen through the eyes of its principal architects and interpreters, working to overcome the ideological nature of recent historiography. The volumes in the series—contextualized through analytical introductions and enriched with explanatory footnotes, bibliographies and indices—offer a wide selection of texts inspired by very different economic visions, and stress their complex consequences and interactions in the rich but often simplified history of European economic thought.

Economic Ideas that Built America reconstructs the development of American political economy as seen through the eyes of its principal architects and interpreters, working to overcome the ideological nature of recent historiography. The volumes in the series—contextualized through analytical introductions and enriched with explanatory footnotes, bibliographies and indices—offer a wide selection of texts inspired by very different economic visions, and stress their complex consequences and interactions in the rich but often neglected history of American economic thought.

A Treatise on Abundance (1638) and Early Modern Views on Poverty and Famine

Carlo Tapia

translation and notes by Tommaso Astarita,

introduction by Gaetano Sabatini

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

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Part of The Anthem Other Canon Economics Series

Series Editor Erik S. Reinert

© 2019 Tommaso Astarita and Gaetano Sabatini editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-958-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-958-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Gaetano Sabatini

Trattato dell’Abondanza/Treatise on Abundance

Title Page and Dedication

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Proemio/Prologue

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Parte Prima/First Part

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Parte Seconda/Second Part

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Parte Terza/Third Part

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Parte Quarta/Fourth Part

Trattato dell’Abondanza: Parte Quinta/Fifth Part

Index of Personal Names

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Alessandro Baratta, The Most Faithful City of Naples

2 Anonymous, Map of the Kingdom of Naples , c. 1650

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Professor Erik Reinert, Abi Pandey and the whole team at Anthem Press for their help with and support of this project.

Tommaso Astarita is grateful to Georgetown University for a sabbatical semester, during which much of the work on the project was possible. He also thanks David Collins, Marden Nichols and Josiah Osgood for help with specific points in the translation of Latin passages. He is grateful to Lawrence Hyman for his willingness to listen cheerfully to many tales of the pleasures and frustrations of translating erudite seventeenth-century texts.

Gaetano Sabatini gratefully remembers Marcello De Cecco (1939–2016), an illustrious economist born in the same town as Carlo Tapia, who first alerted him to the importance of the Treatise on Abundance. He is also thankful to Isabel Aguirre of the Archivo General de Simancas for help in locating documents pertaining to Tapia; to Julien Dubouloz of the Université Aix-Marseille for help in understanding the importance of the classical tradition in Tapia’s work; and to Lina Nicoletti for following with her usual passion and competence the early phases of this work.

INTRODUCTION

Gaetano Sabatini

1. The Particular Features of the Treatise on Abundance

The Treatise on Abundance, published in 1638 in Naples by Carlo Tapia, a high official of Spanish origin, holds a special place within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian discussions of provisioning.¹ The uniqueness of Tapia’s book consists not only in the fact that it is the only treatise published in Italy over those two centuries (i.e., before the large production of essays on this matter in the eighteenth century) devoted fully and expressly to the problems of grain provisioning, but also in the direct involvement of the author with his topic and in the specific character of the work.

Tapia’s personal experience as minister for the king of Spain in Naples, involved on numerous occasions and in various positions in the resolution of concrete problems linked to the provisioning of grains for both Naples and the other communities of the kingdom, was fundamental in shaping the Treatise.² Moreover, Tapia was no ordinary official in Spanish Naples: he held the highest rank among the togati (the robed ones), as the Naples magistrates were commonly called by the habit that distinguished their profession, worked closely with several viceroys and in 1612–24 served on the Council of Italy in Madrid.³ That is, between the 1580s and the 1630s, Tapia encountered, at the highest levels, all the challenges involved in the government of the political, administrative and economic life of the kingdom. The famous 1585 revolt in Naples would suffice to demonstrate how central the challenges of food provisioning were to that government.⁴ The Treatise is thus a work of markedly practical character, born of direct experience both of the concrete problems posed by grain provisions, and of the broader sociopolitical context in which those problems had to be resolved.

Tapia aimed to provide public administrators with clear suggestions on provisioning policy, but he also developed a precise theoretical approach. He validated his arguments by a constant recourse to the authority not only of contemporary or medieval writers and Church Fathers, but even more of Latin authors. This is another important feature of the Treatise: in it, Tapia attempted to recover ancient knowledge, particularly ancient juridical knowledge, pertaining to grain provisioning. This was not a mere homage to a system of thought that played a central role in the culture of his time; rather, Tapia’s recourse to the authority of Roman authors was part of his effort to employ ancient reflections on provisioning matters to strengthen the practical arguments of his work. His use of ancient knowledge further proves its continuing strength throughout the seventeenth century; the next century would aim to clear the deck of all prior tradition and knowledge.

2. The Debate on Provisioning in Naples in the Late Sixteenth Century

In the first half century of Spain’s rule in Naples, the provisioning system for the capital and the provinces did not undergo substantial changes compared to the period of the Aragonese kings (1442–1503).⁵ Thus, in Naples, by far the largest population center in the kingdom, the whole process of grain collecting, milling and bread-making was under the purview of the municipal government, embodied in the seven members of the Tribunal of San Lorenzo, six elected by the noble Seggi (or wards) of the city and one elected by the People’s ward.⁶

This arrangement began to change in the 1550s, especially after a famine in 1555 caused significant tensions in the kingdom’s grain provisions.⁷ Following a series of poor harvests, in 1560 Viceroy Alcalá added to the Tribunal of San Lorenzo a new official called the Grassiero (also known with the ancient Roman name of the Prefect of the Annona). The Grassiero was chosen usually among the regents (i.e., members) of the Collateral Council, the kingdom’s highest administrative organ, and represented the viceroy, with the aim to coordinate, and in effect to concentrate, control over the city’s provisions.⁸ Already since 1548, moreover, Viceroy Pedro de Toledo had brought the Eletto of the People’s ward under viceregal control; this Eletto held the power to regulate flour provisions for the capital’s main market, and to set the retail price of flour. The result of these moves was that the provisioning system came under the de facto control of the viceroy.⁹

The repeated occurrence of poor harvests, which determined the viceroys to devote more attention to the challenges of grain provisioning for Naples, offered further evidence of the consequences of the enormous demographic growth of Naples. In three decades, the city had increased its population by a third. Between the late 1520s and the 1550s, Naples went from around 150,000 inhabitants to about 200,000; it then reached about 300,000 by the first quarter of the seventeenth century; the kingdom as a whole went from 315,990 households in 1532 to 540,090 in 1595.¹⁰ Starting in the 1550s, governing groups in Naples became increasingly aware of the difficulties posed by the city’s demographic growth, and these concerns resulted in new examinations of provisioning challenges. Many authors saw the strong link between population growth and provisioning, though some emphasized the risks to political and social stability inherent in the difficulty of feeding all the capital’s people, while others on the contrary stressed the connection between the size of the city’s population and the increased tax revenues that could result from fiscal management of the processes that brought foodstuffs to Naples.

In 1561, Viceroy Alcalá wrote to the king to propose corrective actions to the city’s excessive growth.¹¹ Philip II did not comment on the specific proposals, but responded with very precise questions, especially on provisions for Naples, to answer which the viceroy commissioned Alonso Sánchez, former treasurer general of the kingdom, member of the Collateral Council and one of the viceroy’s most prominent political advisors, to draft a memorandum.¹² Sánchez argued against proposals to expel or cap the city’s inhabitants, not so much because these moves would violate the privileges of citizenship acquired by migration or marriage,¹³ nor because he underestimated potential risks for public order, but primarily because such measures would damage fiscal revenues by reducing the income from dues on the Naples customhouse, sales taxes on wine and other taxes linked to the size of the city’s population.¹⁴ In terms of the difficulties in provisioning the city, Sánchez saw them as limited to times of war or when the Ottoman navy may obstruct access to the Bay of Naples, that is, to times when the city’s normal provisioning mechanisms would not operate in any case, thus implicitly dismissing the notion that the provisioning system faced structural obstacles.

Another memorandum has come to us together with Sánchez’s, also written for the Duke of Alcalá and on the same subject; its author is unknown, but he clearly was also a high Naples official.¹⁵ Contrary to Sánchez’s opinion, this author strongly favored limits to Naples’s population growth, especially by reference to the challenges of provisioning the city. He neither regarded the difficulties posed by war or the Ottomans to the transport of grains by sea as episodic, nor considered land transport to be a satisfactory alternative:

In terms of carrying grains from Puglia in boxes, as is done in Germany and elsewhere, I think it impossible, because we would need at least ten thousand chariots from Puglia, and each chariot holding six boxes needs eight oxen to pull it from the plains of Puglia, which makes the whole enterprise unmanageable, given how many chariots and oxen would be necessary, especially considering that the kingdom barely has enough oxen for its agricultural needs.¹⁶

In case of a grain shortage, especially at times of war, the city of Naples therefore could not easily be provisioned either by sea or by land, nor was it realistic to think of forcibly expelling even a part of the population, because that would require a very numerous army. Given these premises, and the ever-present consideration that the masses are […] incorrigible, and, if on any day they lack bread, or other necessities, they often make trouble,¹⁷ the anonymous author concluded that serious measures ought to be taken to limit the growth of the city’s population.

The different approaches of Sánchez and the anonymous author to the same problem reflect the dual nature of the Collateral Council, which was at the same time both a political organ and the highest administrative body in the kingdom. As much as the anonymous official supported measures aimed to prevent shortages of foodstuffs by controlling and limiting the city’s growth, Sánchez, who represented the capital’s financial interests, including those of tax-farmers who actively speculated on grain provisions, came to the opposite conclusion.¹⁸ Not by chance, whereas the former author supported as a useful move the expulsion from the city of foreign merchants, accused of controlling the kingdom’s trade and of consuming its riches while impoverishing its feudal lords and its communities, Sánchez stressed the harm that would come to the royal government from the loss of these merchants’ activity, precisely because throughout Naples trade is in the hand of foreigners.¹⁹

The same split within the Collateral occurred when in 1562 the Council took an open vote on the adoption of such measures: the proposals garnered seven positive votes and four negative ones.²⁰ This lack of unanimity may be the reason why the king, when the viceroy informed him of the result of the vote, reduced the decisions approved by the Collateral, accepting only a limit on grants of land to build new edifices within the city walls.²¹

After almost 20 years, in the late 1570s, the joint issues of Naples’s food provisioning and its excessive growth returned to the Collateral’s attention, and again the viceroy asked the regents for written opinions. Among them is a memorandum dated July 23, 1578, authored by Alonso Sánchez Jr., Marquis of Grottola, the kingdom’s general treasurer and the son of the author of the earlier memorandum.²² Sánchez Jr. was an expert on this subject since, among other charges he held, he was also the Grassiero.²³

Father and son represented the capital’s financial circles, and thus perceived the possibility of reducing commercial activities linked to the city’s provisioning as harmful. Sánchez Jr. began his memorandum by mentioning the dangers perceived in Naples’s excessive growth since the time of Viceroy Alcalá—namely, the difficulties of provisioning, the risks for public order, the decrease in fiscal revenues due to the decreased tax base of the communities whose inhabitants were migrating into Naples—but he moved quickly to stress that, since the city could acquire grains from Sicily, and since large storehouses had been built apt to store 200,000 fanegas of grain,²⁴ the risk of famine had been eliminated. He also argued that the decrease in the provincial tax base was more than compensated by the increased revenues from the Naples customhouse and from all the other taxes and dues levied in the city.

Sánchez Jr. did not deny the possible problems of public order due to Naples’s growth and the inefficiencies of the provisioning system, but the only remedy he suggested was the one adopted by the king at the end of the inquiry conducted by Viceroy Alcalá 20 years prior, namely, limiting grants of land with permission to build; he wrote at length on this measure (which, one should note, had been almost totally ignored amid the tumultuous population growth), examined different areas of Naples where new buildings had been raised, or where more could still be built, and expressed his support for extending the prohibition on new buildings to urban areas outside the walls.²⁵

Very different in approach was the memorandum written two years later on the same subject by councilor Pedro Velasquez for Viceroy Juan de Zuñiga.²⁶ The author, who had served as conservator of the royal patrimony in Sicily, held the important office of Scrivano di Razione from 1571 to 1580 and was therefore charged with the supervision of government budgets; he was thus an expert on the kingdom’s financial mechanisms, fully capable of assessing the costs and benefits of any decision.²⁷ More than half of his memorandum focused on the risks for public order and the state’s security that accompanied the city’s excessive growth, with an abundance of historical examples and references to the unstable character of Neapolitans.²⁸ Velasquez reviewed rather quickly other provisioning and fiscal issues: the loss of revenues from communities would not be that significant; the city could get grains from Sicily; it was necessary to alleviate the burdens on the provinces; he devoted more time only to the opportunity of limiting new buildings, which he linked to the need to strengthen Naples’s fortifications, clearly having in mind the dangers that could come from within, rather than outside, the city.

In analyzing these two texts, what is most striking is the complete change in perspective compared to two decades prior. The earlier discussion of the relationship between provisioning, demographic policy and taxation in Naples and its kingdom had come soon after the viceroy had claimed direct control over grain provisioning for the capital, and that discussion had considered adopting further measures, such as limiting the city’s population. Twenty or so years later, when the possibility of a popular insurrection due to food shortages had grown, there was no serious consideration of any other administrative or policy measures to resolve the problem. This trend would conclude with the Naples revolt of 1585, sparked by the decision of the city’s Eletti to raise the price of bread in the capital shortly after they had authorized the export of over 400,000 tomoli of grain from the kingdom to Spain.²⁹ The revolt culminated in the lynching of the People’s Eletto, Giovanni Vincenzo Starace, and had significant echoes across the provinces. The response of the central power was purely repressive, and for about a decade, until the memoranda written in Madrid by Giovanni Francesco de Ponte in 1594–95,³⁰ all attempts to address provisioning problems in the kingdom ceased. It was in the harshly repressive climate of the years after 1585 that Carlo Tapia began his service in royal government, and, through the experience he gained as commissioner charged with obtaining grains in the provinces, began writing the Trattato.

3. Carlo Tapia

Carlo Tapia was born in 1565 in Lanciano, in the province of Abruzzo Ultra, to Egidio, a royal judge in Salerno, and his cousin Isabella Riccia de Tapia, of a family of local nobility. In 1567 Egidio was appointed as a judge in the Vicaria, and in 1575 he became a president of the Sommaria³¹; at his father’s death in 1578, Carlo was placed under the guardianship of Francisco Alvarez de Ribera and Girolamo Olzignano, two other presidents of the Sommaria.³² Both guardians helped start Tapia’s public career, especially Ribera, who in 1580 became the lieutenant of the Sommaria, in 1588 a regent of the Chancery, and in 1597 was called to Madrid to join the Council of Italy.³³

Under Ribera’s guidance, Tapia earned his doctorate in law (civil and canon) at the age of 18, in 1583, and practiced law for a few years.³⁴ In 1586 he published Commentarius in rubricam et legem finalem ff. de Constitutionibus Principum, a work of remarkable erudition focused on the question of whether the sovereign is to be subject to his own laws.³⁵ Tapia’s position—that the prince is not subject to the law, though it is just that he submit to it—falls within a prudent and well-established jurisprudential tradition, but at least two points in this work allow us a glimpse into Tapia’s originality of thought, which would later become more evident. First of all, he stressed that magistrates are the guarantors of the system’s equilibrium, as they are charged with the implementation of the prince’s laws, but also careful to intervene in case the prince should violate them, a position that foreshadows Tapia’s later views on the centrality of the role of magistrates.³⁶ It is also notable that in this work Tapia openly referred to his friendship with Scipione Mazzella and praised this author’s Descrittione del Regno di Napoli, of which Tapia lauded both the concreteness and the completeness of information.³⁷ The closeness to Mazzella, one of few authors attentive to the real problems of the kingdom, especially in the financial realm, attests that Tapia, since the very start of his career and thinking, was especially sensitive to the economic aspects of the problems he examined, even though his first interest in them was institutional.

In July 1588 the count of Miranda, then viceroy, appointed Tapia as judge for the province of Principato Ultra, an interior region of the kingdom frequently affected by smuggling and banditry. The young judge actively engaged with both problems, which were augmented by the province’s border location, its mountainous and impervious landscape, and its distance from Naples, which often led the local barons (i.e., feudal lords) to collusion with bandits and resentment toward representatives of the central power.³⁸ The province moreover included the papal enclave of Benevento, which had long caused jurisdictional conflicts across the area that reverberated in the provincial royal tribunal, often with repercussions in Naples, Rome and Madrid.³⁹

Benevento’s extraterritoriality facilitated smuggling generally and grain speculation in particular. During the harvest, in violation of the kingdom’s laws requiring permits for any export of grain, much grain came to Benevento from surrounding areas, to be then brought to the Naples market when prices increased. In 1588 Tapia acted vigorously against this practice, jailing a few barons held guilty of having illegally brought grain into Benevento.⁴⁰ When the famine persisted into 1589, Viceroy Miranda charged Tapia with the collection of grain in Basilicata to feed Naples.⁴¹ Thanks to the ability demonstrated in those circumstances, in 1591 Tapia was not only transferred to the royal tribunal of Salerno (which supervised the provinces of Principato Citra and Basilicata), but he was also appointed commissioner for collecting grains in those two provinces and in Principato Ultra as well. Given long-standing difficulties in traveling across these areas and the exceptional challenges posed by the famine, the extent of the territory spanned by Tapia’s commission is remarkable. Tapia moreover managed to exercise his responsibilities without recourse to extreme or unpopular measures, such as requisition or confiscation, and without burdening royal finances with purchases at exorbitant prices; his interventions aimed rather to stabilize and control market fluctuations.⁴²

Tapia thus earned the applause of his contemporaries and the gratitude of Viceroy Miranda, who described the good results obtained by the young magistrate in a memorandum addressed to the Madrid court.⁴³ Tapia established a strong personal connection with Miranda, and after 1595 he renewed it with the next viceroy, the count of Olivares. One of these two viceroys was most likely the recipient of a long and detailed memorandum Tapia wrote in the mid-1590s, in which he closely examined the problems affecting the kingdom’s communities, with particular attention to provisioning mechanisms and municipal finances.⁴⁴

His experience as commissioner for grains provided Tapia with the materials for the first part of the Trattato dell’abondanza, which, he wrote, he completed already in 1594⁴⁵; he also published two short essays: the Discurso de la habilidad de la juventud⁴⁶ and the Specchio di mormoratori,⁴⁷ written to defend himself—in the first more indirectly than in the second—against accusations of being too young and without experience for the offices he held. His main work in these years, though, was the De religiosis rebus tractatus, published in 1594, in which Tapia systematically discussed all juridical aspects pertaining to the major institutions of the church and to the status of the clergy.⁴⁸

As had happened with his Commentarius, the publication of this Tractatus also came just before another major step in Tapia’s career: in 1596, he was appointed as a judge of the Vicaria in Naples, and, after less than one year, his name was proposed to the king for appointment to the Sacred Royal Council, the highest appeals court. Thus, in 1597, at the young age of 32, Tapia entered into one of the highest bodies in the judicial and financial administration of the kingdom, in which he would remain for 15 years. There, he largely devoted himself to feudal matters, on which he gained a reputation as holding positions generally hostile to the baronage.⁴⁹ As a member of the Sacred Royal Council, Tapia was an influential advisor to the viceroys, in particular to Count Lemos, who governed Naples in 1610–16. Among other charges, Lemos entrusted Tapia with the chairmanship of the Committee on the Finances of the City of Naples, an organ which coordinated and controlled the administration of the capital’s budget. On the basis of this experience, in 1610 Tapia prepared an articulate memorandum for the viceroy in which he reviewed and expanded many of the issues he had already discussed in the document from about 15 years earlier, but placed special emphasis on the problems of local finances.⁵⁰

During his years in Naples between 1597 and 1612, besides his work on the Sacred Royal Council, Tapia was engaged in numerous other tasks on behalf of the central government, the city of Naples, various communities from the kingdom, charitable institutions, hospitals, monasteries, congregations, religious orders and so on. His ability to manage such a vast amount of work in different areas earned Tapia the admiration of