The Little Republic That Could
15th Century Italy’s borders would be unrecognisable to modern eyes. A mish-mash of a Papal theocracy, family-owned city-states and foreign kingdoms rampaged across the peninsula in petty vendettas and passionnate mercantilism.
Back then, the Papacy faced a period of financial turbulence and Pope Eugene IV defaulted on a 25'000 florin loan drawn from Cosimo di Medici, the legendary founder of his namesake House. To settle the debt, the Pope forfeited the town of Sansepolcro, in modern day Umbria. Cartographers from the House of Medici and from the Vatican drew out the new demarcation line, meeting on a tiny river marked merely as Rio.
What neither side realised is that the river had a confluence and either party had merely plotted out their border to their closest respective tributary. What was left was a tiny, 500m wide strip of land on a hill between the streams and effectively in legal limbo. The 350 inhabitants were quick to declare independence for their hamlet, forming the smallest country in the world at the time, the Republic of Cospaia.
Cosimo and Eugene were much too preocuppied with foreign affairs and were all too glad to have a buffer state between their borders, sanctioning the new-born Republic in 1441.
Despite being illiterate, the cospaiesi were bright enough to realise the benefits of being independent - Cospaia quickly became a leaderless anarchic freeport, subject to no law, tax or duty. The economy boomed as the neighbouring towns, groaning under punitive taxes, could not compete with furious commercial activity from what was essentially a tax haven next door.
The Republic would face another boom in the 1570's, when a (ironically) medicinal plant, tobacco, arrived from the Americas and schemed its way to the Italian peninsula. People across the Continent did not take long to figure out that instead of vainly treating fevers, toothaches and ulcers, they could instead smoke the plant. The habit spread like wildfire.
In 1642, Pope Urban VIII enacted a harsh prohibition on the “devil’s plant”, threatening any smoker with excommunication. The Republic of Cospaia remained legally immune, however, and soon the cultivation of tobacco in the village turned it into Italy’s epicentre for the tobacco trade. Even when the prohibition was scaled back in favour of cultivation taxes in 1724, Cospaia flooded the Italian market with what was probably one of the world’s first cases of illicit tobacco trade.
The sturdy Republic was one of the few countries to make it through the Napoleonic era without reverting to absolutism, an honour shared with San Marino, Switzerland and the United States. By the early 1800's, it was a bustling commercial freeport, with major commercial families from all over Italy represented in warehouses across the cramped village.
The Pope at the time was Leo XII. A ravenous anti-semite, he had forbidden Jewish people from owning property and from engaging in commerce with Christians - to see Jewish families from the major Italian city-states set up shop in Cospaia was the last straw. Leo arranged with Florence to have the Republic dismantled and Cospaia’s 385 years of independence came to an end in 1826.
The Cospaian dream was libertarian in the extreme but more significant than the political suggestion of the story is the insight it provides into a time of intense vanities and petty human rivalries. Bankers, Kings, Popes and Emperors were too preocuppied with chasing each other’s tails, running their citizen’s livelihoods into the ground. They sought futile scapegoats for their incompetence and a bloody release for their prejudices in enemy Italians, snuff, waltz dancing and Jewish families.
All the while, 350 ballsy and deeply ironic farmers could not believe their eyes when the world’s borders quite literally split at the seams and across their village - and did not skip a beat to squeeze all they could from the crumbling world around them.
