ABSTRACT
The lordship of Piombino was one of the smallest of the signorie in fifteenthcentury Italy, comprising the small town of Piombino itself, some surrounding villages, the fortress at Populonia and, importantly, the island of Elba together with one or two additional islands off the coast of Tuscany, such as Monte Cristo.1 Seen from this perspective its history appears marginal to that of Renaissance Italy; this region lay some way to the south of the great Tuscan
1 Paolo Ghelardoni, ‘Il territorio piombinese nel XV secolo’, in Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut and Gabriella Garzella (eds) Populonia e Piombino in età medievale e moderna (Pisa, 1996), pp. 83-9. For the history of the state of Piombino the starting point is a seventeenth-century manuscript (MS 139) in the Biblioteca Civica Falesiana, Piombino, entitled ‘Memorie le più antiche che si sono potuto ricavare dalla Città di Piombino’ (hereafter: MS 139). On this MS, see Ottavio Banti, ‘Di una storia manoscritta del principato di Piombino’, in Lemut and Garzella (eds), Populonia e Piombino, pp. 918. The MS was extensively used by Agostino Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato di Piombino e osservazioni intorno ai diritti della Corona di Toscana sopra i castelli di Valle e Montone (2 vols, Florence, 1788). The standard study has long been Licurgo Cappelletti, Storia della Città e Stato di Piombino dalle origini fino all’anno 1814 (Livorno, 1897); add now Nedo Tavera, L’Ascesa di Piombino al declino della Repubblica di Pisa (Florence, 1978), and very briefly Mauro Carrara, Signori e Principi di Piombino (Pontedera, 1994); see also Sergio Tognetti and Patrizia Meli, Il principe e il mercante nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Florence, 2006). The scattered historical work of the travelling railwayman Romualdo Cardarelli advanced some way beyond Cappelletti: for this period, see Romualdo Cardarelli, Baldaccio d’Anghiari e la Signoria di Piombino nel 1440 e 1441 con prefazione e introduzione sulla storia dello Stato di Piombino dagli inizi fino a tutto il 1439 (Rome, 1922), a work based on his tesi di laurea which contains a fearsome invective against a journal editor who had failed to keep the promise to publish the entire work. However, neither his projected grand history of Piombino under the Appiani, nor his history of the Spanish
centres of political authority and cultural activity, such as Florence and Arezzo. Indeed, its lords, the Appiano family, were despatched there in exile from Pisa, which they had managed to lose to the Visconti ruler of Milan.2 Yet Piombino’s significance, like that of (say) the rock of Gibraltar, was out of all proportion to its size. Its rulers often attempted to look out towards the sea, and to ensure that they did not become immersed in the complex politics of fifteenth-century Italy. All the same, it was the target of armies led by such redoubtable warlords as Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, Aragon and Sicily, and Cesare Borgia. This in part reflects its strategic position, for by controlling the waters around Elba the lords of Piombino also potentially controlled the movement of traffic along the coast of Tuscany, between Italy and Corsica which was itself, though only briefly, a target of their ambitions.
