The nature of Nations. Lombards, Germans and barbarians in the political relations of a regional state

Abstract

The aim of the article is to demonstrate that the propensity for the ethnic classification of places and people increased in Lombardy under the rule of the Sforza during the fifteenth century: national denominations, often used in a neutral way, but soon with an emphasis on the negative traits associated with barbarism, occur in state correspondence. This lexicon thus projects the political relationship over not only a customary tradition, but also a natural background, because by nature an individual belonged to what was called a nation and because it is from nature that the salient features of the nation derive. The hypothesis is that this change is connected to general cultural processes of the Renaissance, but – above all – to decisive political transformations that took place in the fifteenth century: a strengthening of the Italian diplomatic horizon, with the establishment of the Italic League, and the deterioration of the relationships between the state of Milan and its neigh- bors, Switzerland and Grisons. Of particular importance were the new strategies of legitimizing the central authority through the ideological transformation of the relationship of obedience, stabilizing the state’s power over its subjects as being almost unnegotiable as nature in itself.