The Honor Deficit
- patricklewisbaker
- Mar 4, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 21
Historians who write about merchant republics during the Renaissance often speak of an “honor deficit,” an inability on the part of city governments to command the respect of other governments and of their own peoples. In Florence and Siena, the ignoble popolo had long ago defeated the old civic nobility, and to carry a noble name—the prime hallmark of honor elsewhere in European society—was often a political liability in those cities. Equality, as a political value, trumped dignitas or personal prestige. Lacking princely courts to recognize honor, lacking armies of their own or a knightly ethos, republican city-states were governed by nobodies—names picked randomly out of leather bags: butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. Behind the scenes, oligarchs and merchant bankers like the Medici called the tune, governing the state in the interests of their own family and party. To outside observers, republican cities seemed vulgar, unstable, rent by violence, unreliable in alliances, manipulated by commercial interests, and therefore deficient in honor and piety…