Paths of Wickedness and Crime

By Mark Galeotti

There were shadows to the Italian Renaissance. Just as art and philosophy were flourishing, so too were darker practices, from murder-for-hire to prostitution. However, despite popular parallels between families like the Borgia and the Medici and the Mafia, there has been little systematic examination of the presence of organised crime in the era. In this short and lively essay, Mark Galeotti rereads and occasionally reinterprets the rich secondary literature to introduce a cast of corrupt princes, bandit chieftains, professional assassins, human traffickers, thugs and conmen and suggest that there were signs of the early beginnings of organised criminality in the towns and cities of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. An historian and political scientist, Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at New York University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365174308

Mark Galeotti

Mark Galeotti is a scholar of Russian security affairs with a career spanning academia, government service and business, a prolific author and frequent media commentator. He heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy and is an Honorary Professor at University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies as well as holding fellowships with RUSI, the Council on Geostrategy and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He has been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark, Charles University (Prague) and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is the author of over 25 books including A Short History of Russia (Penguin, 2021) and The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022).

Book preview

Paths of Wickedness and Crime

Paths of Wickedness and Crime: the underworlds of the Renaissance Italian City

Paths of Wickedness and Crime: the underworlds of the Renaissance Italian City

Mark Galeotti

GONFALONE

ebook Edition

Gonfalone Press

http://lulu.com/spotlight/Gonfalone

ISBN 978-1-365-17430-8

Copyright © Mark Galeotti 2012; ebook version © Mark Galeotti 2015

Mark Galeotti asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

Typeset in Hoefler Text. The cover is based on a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century fresco The Effects of Bad Government on the City, part of the series The Allegory of Good and Bad Government

About the Author

Mark Galeotti specialises in fairly murky and morally-dubious subjects: modern Russian history and security affairs and transnational and organised crime both past and present.

He read history at Robinson College, Cambridge and then took his doctorate in government at the London School of Economics. He was then based at Keele University between 1991 and 2008, becoming head of the History department. In that time he was also seconded to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office as an adviser on Russian foreign and security policy (1996-97) and was visiting professor in public security at the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers–Newark, USA (2005-6). He moved to New York University in January 2009, where he is Professor in Global Affairs at the SCPS Center for Global Affairs.

He has twelve monographs and edited collections to his name, including Organised Crime in History (Routledge, 2009) and is the founding editor of the journal Global Crime (formerly Transnational Organized Crime). He is now working on a number of projects including a history of Russian organised crime and a co-authored study of Russian politics. This essay emerges from a long-term project of his, Criminal World, looking at the evolution of organised crime from the Mediterranean pirates and bandits of antiquity to today’s gangs.

Contents

Foreword

1. ‘Paths of Wickedness’

2. Criminal Ancestries

3. Crime and the City

4. Law and Order

5. Wholesale and Retail Murder

6. Vice

7. Financial Crimes

8. Thievery

9. An Underworld Infrastructure

10. Some Tentative Conclusions

Foreword

L

eonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of the Vitruvian Man presents an idealised, perfectly-proportioned figure, outstretched arms and legs touching a circle and a square, curves, corners and planes. There is but one Man, yet two sets of limbs, and the circle and the square have slightly different centres. Da Vinci was exploring geometry and anatomy, but the Man also offers an interesting metaphor for the early, inchoate organised criminality which was beginning to emerge in Renaissance Italy.

Despite popular parallels between the Italian Renaissance and the Mafia, there has been little systematic examination of the presence of organised crime within the era. It is all too easy to throw out lines about the ‘godfathers of the Renaissance,’ of ‘mafia-style tactics,’ but hard to get to grips with quite what this means. We have enough trouble agreeing definitions of organised crime in the modern world[1] – what could we be talking about when we try to apply this concept to the Renaissance? ‘Crime’ is a legal term; ‘organised’ a strangely fluid one; and ‘organised crime’ something as often as not rooted in a specific time and a specific place.

In that context, this essay is no more than a very early start, a thought experiment, a preliminary exploration, which in the main draws unapologetically from existing secondary historical accounts of the time, read through the prism of modern criminology. A subsequent, more serious academic study will, of course, need to dig into the primary source materials, but my conviction is that from this initial survey there are grounds to believe that this was indeed an era in which we can begin to see the ancestors of modern organised crime emerge. The countryside of the Italian Renaissance was very much the playground of bandits, smugglers and lords who did as they pleased so long as they had might on their side, but these ‘fur-collar criminals’ (in Barbara Hanawalt’s witty phrase[2]) were little different from their medieval forebears.

Instead, it was in the towns and cities of the Renaissance that the crime which is such a depressing constant of human activity began to develop more organised forms. As I will discuss, the gap between crimes that are organised – as almost any activities involving premeditation and multiple offenders will be – and organised crime tends to close when the criminals are forced to cooperate outside their intimate circles of family and friends. The criminals themselves tended to be autonomous: individuals and small and usually short-lived groups. But they were part of an increasingly sophisticated parallel economy, with organisation emerging from the need to cross class, regional or professional boundaries. Thieves needed fences to turn loot into cash; the rich and powerful looked for the desperate and anonymous to distribute their counterfeit; brother-owners turned to traffickers for fresh supplies of