The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice

by Robert C. Davis

The War of the Fists is a study of seventeenth-century worker culture in the city of Venice, focusing on the mock battles, or battagliole , which the town's two popular factions waged on public bridges. These "little battles" were partly festive battle, partly sport, and partly thinly veiled plebeian they could involve as many as a thousand fighters on each side and attracted crowds of thirty thousand or more. Their importance in the city's plebeian life makes bridge battles an extremely valuable point of entry for exploring structures of Venetian popular culture, a task which Robert Davis attempts at four the social geography of Venetian factionalism; the combat itself, and its relationship to social culture; the festive world which grew up around the encounters; and the response of Venice's patrician state to this largely uncontrollable worker celebration.
From the study there emerges a popular world often surprisingly with plebeian honor, status, and neighborhood loyalties that flourished in parallel and sometimes in competition with a patrician domination of urban life at the city's geographic center. In a sense, these encounters represented popular culture "in the making," as Venice's marginal classes fashioned out of apparent chaos the ritual structures they needed to satisfy social needs that otherwise went unmet in their aristocratic state.
As a microhistory that uses Venetian bridge battles as a key to understanding many facets of popular society, The War of the Fists will be of interest to social historians and historical anthropologists, as well as historians of urban society, gender, workers, sports, social geography, popular art and culture, and the absolutist state.

Genres: History, Italy, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 1994

About the author

Robert C. Davis is professor emeritus of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He has studied Naples, Rome, Palermo, Venice, the Vatican, and Perugia, and mostly works on the lives of ordinary people and the values they cherished. His subjects have ranged from shipbuilders, bull fighters, and amateur boxers in Venice to the corsairs who terrorized the Mediterranean everywhere else. He has co-authored studies of Venice as the world's most touristed city and of Renaissance men and women. He has also been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade, and is currently writing a textbook on the history of modern Europe.

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early modern Venice may have been famous for its wealth, but it was also a crowded, fragile, and socially rigid city-state, and one might find it extraordinary that Venetians tolerated a culture of public street fighting during the same era. In this fascinating account, author Robert Davis argues that the Venetian pugni, which flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provided a necessary outlet for “plebeian energy” (p. 10) and created a bridge between social classes. Street fights united classes in part because they grew out of rivalries between multi-class neighborhoods, specifically those of the Nicolotti (from Venice's land-side district) and the Castellani (the harbor parishes). The fighting gangs were led by the best fighters in each neighborhood, namely fishermen and naval arsenal workers, and their fights took place on the city's bridges, neutral territories that had the added advantage of visibility. In the late Middle Ages the fighters used sticks and shields, but by the sixteenth century they had come to rely exclusively on their fists. The factional captains, or padrini, organized the pugni in the fall, after tensions had been simmering all summer, and started them with a series of single duels (mostre) that finally gave way to a giant brawl, or frotta (pp. 47-78). Afterward, the padrini and older fighters (vecchi delle fattioni) might dine with the city's noblemen, who took bets on the fights' outcomes and helped free jailed fighters.

Venetian street fighting served multiple social purposes. It “opened an alternative world of honor and respect” (87) for laborers and shopkeepers who lacked power or upward mobility, but who could attain renown as fight captains or veterans. It provided participants with a chance to demonstrate their manhood (an important part of Mediterranean culture) and develop a public persona. Neighborhoods also derived benefits from the pugni: non-combatants watched the fights, celebrated them in huge public festivals, and looked forward, if their fighters won, to receiving a collective victory crown and humiliating the losers. Such neighborhood solidarity gave marginal Venetians an institutional stake in the city, similar to that which local confraternities and guilds offered merchants, wealthier craftsmen, and patricians.

The pugni helped distract Venetians from their city's mounting misfortunes, but the institution ended in 1705. The Castellani lost most of their best fighters in the Candian War against Turkey, and the fights became unbalanced and uninteresting. City elites began to turn in the eighteenth century toward more “refined” amusements, and the factions sought other ways to perform for the public: forming human pyramids on the bridges, holding boat races, and – as Davis explained in a paper that I had the good fortune to attend – releasing angry bulls into each other's neighborhoods. None of these spectacles, however, had quite the same blend of martial valor and sheer riotousness as the pugni, and one suspects Venice lost an important element of its internal solidarity when they ceased.

[Emily Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great discussion of this phenomenon. Explains cultural aspects to the reader well,

[Erdem Kale · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war of the fists feels rough in a good way, like you’re right there inside the chaos