Returning to the recurrent theme of resilience, it is suggested that the ecological model of adaptive cycles helps to understand the responses of the post-antique world to crisis. Rather than rejecting the old model of civilisation based on cities, memories of the past are constantly used both as providing material for new adaptations, and as a way of associating contemporary realities with those of the classical world. The writings of the authors discussed in this book as seen as part of this process, of transmitting and adapting memories.

After Cannae, Hannibal needed a maritime base to allow reinforcements and supplies to reach him. But he failed to win over or capture Naples, an old Roman naval ally, and had mixed results elsewhere in Campania: he was successful at proud Capua. He was under-supported from Carthage for all his time in Italy, whether because they could not or would not help him. In 215, he signed a treaty of alliance with Philip V of Macedon. This brought few benefits to either party and would long be remembered by the Romans. Syracuse in Sicily went over to Hannibal in 214 but was recaptured by Claudius Marcellus (late 212). Similarly most of coastal Tarentum in south Italy was in his hands, but only between 212 and 209. In 211, when Capua was under Roman pressure, Hannibal marched on Rome as a diversionary tactic but soon withdrew. Capua fell and was harshly treated.

An account of the political and military events leading to the destruction of the evacuated documents of the Naples State Archives by German soldiers in September 1943. The nature of the lost material, especially the registers of the Angevin dynasty, and subsequent attempts to recreate what can be known of this material.

This chapter focuses on the life and writings of Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815) and provides one way through which to map out the shifts and transformation of the cosmopolitan ideal in an age of growing patriotism. Napoli Signorelli wrote and lived between the intellectual and political worlds of two connected peripheries of Europe, Italy and Spain, and one of its intellectual centres, France. The Bourbon courts in Madrid and Naples provided the political thread for these debates and the Neoclassical tradition the background for them. The querelle between the ancients and moderns remained central, as writers searched within and outside of the Neoclassical tradition to stake their claims. Knowledge of the shared ground of the Neoclassical canon bound enlightenment writers together but also provided the fodder to drive them apart. Napoli Signorelli’s work and life illuminates a crisis or reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism, specifically at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Neoclassical underpinnings of cosmopolitanism were unsettled by emerging patriotic identities within Europe.

Chapter 5 is a case study, further pursuing the conclusions of Chapters 3 and 4, and analysing an example of ‘hard-to-integrate’ foreigner: southern Italian sailors were imagined by British officers and policymakers through the lens of substantial racial stereotypes, compounded by cultural, linguistic, and religious differences, mutual unfamiliarity, and the Mediterranean’s geographical distance from the British world. This did not mean that it was deemed impossible to turn these seamen into useful and respected crew members. However, it did mean that, if this was to happen, they needed to be completely removed from the structures of their own state, and particularly from the influence and perceived corruption and inefficiency of Neapolitan and Sicilian officers. The imbalanced power dynamic between Britain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which during the French Wars came to depend entirely on the Royal Navy, led to frequent manpower exchange, and affected the interactions between British and Neapolitan officers. Collaboration and patronage flourished, but so did acrimony and rivalry. This tense undercurrent offered British officers a chance of separating the seamen whom they were reclaiming as perfectly good recruits from the stereotypes of corruption and unreliability that they associated with those seamen’s country.

Patronage and commissioning of public events and buildings was a key tool in the attainment and replication of social status in antiquity. In the early Middle Ages, new ideals emerged around Christian forms of wealth and support, and different values were attached to the acquisition of agricultural land. Urban properties took on new relevance, and agricultural property became socially valuable in new ways. Cultivated spaces within cities came to be newly prestigious. This chapter considers the principal means by which aristocrats and rulers performed status and power within the late antique and early medieval cities of Italy, marshalling the new evidence of urban cultivation to inform our understanding of power in the built environment. It then develops three examples of this process from the mid eighth century to the early tenth, in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. These examples show clearly the sophisticated strategies employed by rulers, ecclesiastical institutions, and families alike to control cultivated spaces, and the social status which came with successful strategies.

This chapter considers the economic context of urban food production of the Middle Ages and situates household-scale production within its wider context. It explores the emergence of evidence for urban markets for foodstuffs and suggests ways in which we might understand the absence of that evidence for the period prior to the eleventh century. In the absence of commercial-scale farming of foodstuffs, household-level cultivation was the principal means of acquiring food for most city-dwellers. The possession of food gardens and their exchange through horizontal networks of families or social groups allow us to see the prominence of family links in the management of urban property and the control of urban food production. The systems which emerged to permit the feeding of urban populations in the early part of our period arose in the context of new ideas about wealth, and emerging communities, such as religious households and priestly households, which required new solutions to feeding urban populations.

Both the urbanism and agriculture of the early Middle Ages broke from the past. A picture of food cultivation and urban density of the cities of Roman Italy is sketched in order to gauge the transformations of late antiquity, which included the reduced population of Italian cities and the fragmentation of urban settlement. The changed urban landscape created possible spaces for food cultivation where there had not been any before. These are apparent in the archaeological record as early as the fifth century and in the textual record in the later sixth century. A key piece of evidence for the transformation of cities is the presence of Dark Earth, humic soil formed in urban contexts after the end of the Roman empire. Dark Earth in Italy is shown here to have been transformed from deposits which were formed deliberately and which underwent a number of different, related processes of waterlogging, accretion, and weathering. The broader economic shape of early medieval Italy, in terms of both regional networks as well as Mediterranean connections, provides a sense of how strategically important urban cultivation became in post-Roman Italy.

Early medieval Italy was the most densely urbanized part of western Eurasia until the eleventh century. This chapter examines the practices of urbanism in the Italian peninsula, considering the social and political implications of living in cities and how they shaped the ways of life and patterns of governance in Latin- and Greek-speaking areas of the Italian peninsula. Special consideration is paid to how the Carolingian conquest and Frankish control of parts of Italy might have challenged the roles played by cities in economic and political life in those areas. Urbanism and investment in cities were tools for Carolingian rulers of Italy and their contemporaries.

Key to the training of the boys was their master, who was responsible for their upkeep as well as their musical training. Men in such positions had typically themselves been through choirboy training and were highly accomplished musicians. The most notable choirmaster in the book’s period of interest, Jean Thorion, a native of Saint-Omer, offers a particularly astonishing example of the international draw of northern maîtrise training. In his youth, Thorion had been employed far away from his homeland in Florence, where he worked as a singer and tutor at the priory of the SS Annunziata. Here he was patronised directly by the Medici family, and Lorenzo Il Magnifico in particular. Apparently the most significant role within the northern maîtrise of this period was that occupied by the tenorist, in which role no one was more glittering than the former tenorist of King Ferrante of Naples, Grigoire Bourgois, a central figure in St Omer for a quarter of a century. The chapter also addresses the copying of polyphonic music, and most importantly the role in this capacity of the celebrated composer Jean Mouton, a native of the region.

Chapter 5 explores the early spread of vaccination in continental Europe. If news of Jenner’s discovery quickly spread abroad, the delivery of vaccine in a viable state proved a major challenge. Diplomatic and medical networks explain its early arrival in Germany and Austria. From 1799, Dr De Carro made Vienna a major centre for the spread of the practice, with the samples sent to Lord Elgin in Istanbul seeding the practice in Greece. The British military build-up in the Mediterranean opened new channels for the dissemination of English cowpox. By vaccinating sailors aboard ship, Drs Marshall and Walker brought fresh vaccine to Gibraltar and Malta and Marshall established vaccination in Sicily and southern Italy early in 1801. Dr Sacco’s discovery of a local source of cowpox in cattle in Lombardy in late 1800 led to important trials and, over the following decade, an impressive vaccination programme in northern Italy. In the interstices of war in Europe, the practice developed as an international enterprise with several important new hubs.

Piero’s behaviour in the months before the denouement of the cousins’ conspiracy in late April showed the two contrasting sides of his nature: lazy and hyperactively scheming. Both were pinpointed by Becchi’s idiosyncratic turn of phrase when he criticised him – on one hand – for letting ser Piero Dovizi govern Italy as his boss while he rested on his oars, ‘allowing some wind to blow the boat where the oars can’t arrive, it wears you out to use your arms’, and on the other for restlessly moving in a rocking gondola: ‘keep still, for God’s sake, for you can’t see everything and you shouldn’t help the side opposite to yours’.1 Outwardly, at least, Piero seemed unworried either by his cousins or by the French expedition. He stood high in the pope’s esteem as the broker of a possible marriage for little Laura (the pope’s daughter) and, indeed, as Florence’s St. Peter, ‘the rock on which our city is now rising up’.2 He was also as ‘ambiguous’ as the pope, ‘temporising in order to see whom to please’. After receiving despatches from France, Milan, Rome and Naples in November 1493, with news of ‘Ferrante’s trepidation, the pope’s instability and the general state of affairs in Milan’, Piero told Dovizi he had little to reply except that he was waiting to hear more before writing to Becchi in France, so that, ‘well informed, [Becchi] can … temporise or do as he thinks fit’.3 In the meantime, he was busy organising the joust that he and his friends had long been practising for – probably on the large tract of public land along the walls he had enclosed in November as a jousting yard. In Piazza S. Croce the stockades had been built and the seating was being constructed.4 Then, at the end of January, everything came to an abrupt halt, not because of the cousins or news from France, but because of the death of Ferrante of Naples on 25 January 1494.