The First Revolution
It is July 7, 1647.
Dawn spills over the Piazza de Mercato in Naples as the fish sellers and vendors gather for the day’s trade. Grain merchants, money lenders, bakers, fruiterers, poets, butchers, vagabonds, jewellers, thieves, scoundrels, acrobats, bandits, travellers, smugglers, spies, assassins.
Worshippers head to the Carmelite Santa Maria del Carmine as the bells ring out. Best of friends call out to each other, worst of enemies lurk low.
Over the centuries, Naples has grown and surged from a seaside village to a lively coastal metropolis of two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand souls. The largest city in the Mediterranean. A paradise inhabited by devils.
The once independent Italian kingdom is now ruled over by Spanish royalty, the colonial empire of the once triumphant Habsburg crown. After a hundred years under Spanish dominion, the Neapolitan working class is squeezed by regressive taxation to fund a string of expensive, endless wars and revolts across Europe.
Rodrigo Ponce de León serves as the Viceroy of Naples, responsible for all taxation, all law, all decrees, all royal justice. Spain continues to impose more taxes. New taxes are added for olive oil and silk, salt and flour, fruit.
Everyone hates the taxes. None more so than Masaniello. He is twenty-seven years old and although his real name is Tommaso Aniello, everyone calls him Masaniello. He was born in a lane behind the market square. He lives in the Pendino quarter, where the tax on fish is collected.
He carries himself with grace and a certain lightness. Black eyes, blond hair, with locks that run down his neck. An untutored, unlearned, uneducated son of a fisherman who himself is the son of a fisherman.
As the sun splashes over the market there’s already talk of additional taxes on fishing. Squid and octopus, crimson tuna and delicate branzino, even small fillets of anchovies.
Masaniello has been caught before trying to avoid taxes by making deliveries directly to his customers. Even delivering to the palazzos and villas of the rich, of the aristocrats, of the ruling class.
In jail he met the lawyer Marco Vitale and the elderly priest and political philosopher Giulio Genoino. The men filled his head with talk of reform, of a new republic, of a better world for all.
All three had long been out of prison. Today they smile at each other as crowds gather in the square for the Feast of the Madonna of the Carmine. Every year as part of the festival, a mock battle is staged between the people of Naples and Turkish invaders to commemorate the epic sea battle of Lepanto in 1571 when the Turks were finally defeated.
Masaniello is in charge of the mock army fighting the mock Turks. Men and women and children are jostling, cheering. Everyone is in high spirits.
Whispers pass through the crowd that the Spanish are to levy yet another tax on fruit, the food of the poor. Masaniello is enraged and leads his ragtag army out of the festival, out of make-believe and attacks the tax-collection stalls.
Screaming against bad government, Masaniello burns down the customs office and destroys the home of an infamous tax collector. An angry crowd of tens of thousands pours through Naples towards the palace of the Spanish Viceroy, who flees to a neighbouring convent.
Masaniello holds court outside his house. He ransacks the armouries and opens the prisons. He is elected capo del popolo, captain-general and dispenses justice. Several rioters are condemned to death by him and beheaded. Troops attempting to reclaim the city are rebuffed. Dissent begins spreading to the provinces.
It is the first proletariat anti-colonial resistance movement of the modern world. A revolution without parallel in ancient or modern history. More than a century before the revolutions in America or France.
Masaniello demands parity between the people and the nobility on the city council. A new charter for Naples is proposed. They don’t want to tear down the state. They want to work with the Spanish Viceroy to repeal the taxes and dislodge aristocratic control.
Nine days after the revolution begins, Masaniello is murdered in a monastery by hired assassins. His head is severed and taken to the Spanish Viceroy.
It would be another one hundred and fifty years before Naples is swept by other waves of revolutionary fervour.