Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World
Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century..
The Source:
Chris Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (The Lawrence Stone Lectures) Princeton 2015
Chapter 1 Communes
… Italian communes have been widely used … to denote one of the stepping-stones to the modern world, for their bottom-up collaboration, for their move away from monarchical institutions, for their institutional creativity, or for their secular (and therefore more ‘modern’) culture … [Not] all of these descriptions are incorrect; communes were indeed characterised by institutional creativity (if for no other reason than that their institutions tended to fail), and were also indeed founded on bottom-up collaboration (however fundamentally shot through they were with hierarchical and military-aristocratic values and rivalries as well). These were novelties, and their very contradictions make them interesting, as well as difficult to explain. The leitmotif of this book will therefore be such contradictions; and they are best summed up by a simple problem.
[11th century]
North and central Italian cities in 1050 (say) were run by aristocratic and military—and also clerical—élites with much the same practices and values as those anywhere else in Latin Europe; and, even if they were sometimes hard to control, these élites were, just as elsewhere, fully part of hierarchies which extended upwards to bishops, counts, and kings or emperors, as part of a coherent Kingdom of Italy.
[12th century]
By contrast, in 1150 (say) they were run by élites which may well have been from the same families, but which had developed autonomous and novel forms of collective government focused on annually changing consuls in fifty and more cities and towns, almost none of them looking more than nominally to any superior powers, which regularly fought each other; such governments seemed highly radical to outsiders, and were organised enough and sure enough of themselves to be able thereafter to ally together and fight off the most serious attempt by an emperor to control Italy in depth for two hundred years, that of Frederick Barbarossa, in the years 1158–77.
[MH: note that the term “consul” here so far has no clear defined meaning other than “the city’s leaders”—working alongside an archbishop. An exploration of its meaning is made below in the context of Milan.]
This was a new world. And yet they made this to-us dramatic change without, in all but a few cases, showing us any evidence of an awareness that they were doing anything new. … What did they think they were doing? The short answer is that we do not know, and will never know, except very partially indeed. Our evidence is scarce, of course; this is the middle ages, and not the late middle ages of the documentary explosion, which in Italy was fully under way by 1250 but not at all a century earlier. But the question is important enough that it is worth trying to answer it. …
… The first point that needs to be made (and it is one that is uncontroversial in the historiography) is that the leadership of medieval Italian cities was not ever exclusively commercial, whether mercantile or artisanal, unlike the picture often painted for northern Europe. Most of Italy’s major landowners lived in cities—that was the basic reason why Italian cities were so much larger, more powerful, and more socio-politically complex than those of the rest of Latin Europe, and had been for centuries—and they always had a central role to play in city politics.
Indeed, economic development, although it was moving fast in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was not in itself a necessary cause of the development of communes; the major ports of Pisa and Genoa were precocious communes, and so were the exchange foci of Cremona and Milan, but Venice was not, and plenty of relatively uncommercial centres, such as Bergamo or Parma, developed consular régimes at much the same speed as economic leaders; I will not have much to say about economics here as a result.
Essentially, early city communes are by now generally recognised to have been, in the very loosest sense of the word, aristocratic: they were not usually the result of open conflict … and they worked to perpetuate the power of landed élites of different types.
It was the pre-communal period, above all the early and mid-eleventh century, that was the period of urban uprisings; the very earliest evidence for what could be called communes, by contrast, appears in the last decade of the eleventh century in the case of a handful of cities and the twelfth, often well into the twelfth, for the others.
They [communes] appeared, historians often now say, in the context not of contestation but of compromise: between the different factions or strata of urban élites, between bishops and secular urban leaders, and between those leaders and wider communities.
This occurred above all as a result of the confusion caused by the Investiture Dispute in the decades after 1076, which pitted emperor against pope and led to a civil war in Italy (including, often, rival bishops in individual cities and thus a crisis of their traditional leaderships) in the 1080s–90s, and to the steady breakdown of the Kingdom itself from then on into the following decades; communes were thus a defensive reaction to crisis.
… I would not disagree with most of the general picture. But the stress on aristocratic dominance has had its good and its bad side.
It can be a reality check on older romantic notions of popular democracy winning out in the Italian city-republics, but it can also, even now, be based on a Paretoesque assumption that all historical protagonism is really aristocratic by definition.
Some Italian historiography … has stressed how the real sources of political power did not change at all with the early communes … the new city régimes were mostly not called ‘communes’ until the mid-twelfth century, but ‘cities’, civitates, as they had always been, thus hiding for us (and for them?) any changes in their governance—indeed, commune was not even a noun in sources for most cities before the 1120s, but an adjective or adverb, meaning ‘collective’ or ‘in common’.
Furthermore, it is now often argued, not just that consuls had or could have a public role from very early— which is not hard to show—but also that consular régimes simply inherited the public role that counts and bishops had in cities before them.
A further element of continuity was the undoubted importance of iudices [judges], men with legal training and experience, for they had run cities under bishops in the eleventh century, under some mixed régimes in the early twelfth, and then under more clearly consular-dominated régimes in the mid-twelfth: it has been argued that as long as they controlled public acts, the legal basis of such acts was unlikely to be very different.
These latter arguments, however, risk flattening out the period so completely that the real novelties of the consular period, whether consciously perceived at the time or not, become invisible. For example: the main way in which the traditional regnum Italiae, which united Italy north of Rome from the seventh century to the eleventh, showed its public identity and legitimacy was through assemblies called placita, where justice was done on a regular basis in the sight of large numbers of people; these judicial assemblies vanished in almost the whole of north-central Italy in the late eleventh century, and communes did not seek to re-create them.
Either the placitum tradition, with its strong ‘public’ element, did not work any more; or consular régimes felt that they did not have access to it; or else public power had become differently located. Whichever way, a basic underpinning of political power was lost or greatly changed; and legal experts visibly adapted to that, indeed took it for granted. …
Where historians have disagreed more in the last generation is over the nature of the élites which ruled early communes. For a start, if major landowners were important in communally ruled cities, how different were such cities from the countryside at all? Hagen Keller, already author of some of the best general articles on the formation of the communes, in 1979 published a major book which (among other things) argued strongly, based largely on evidence from Milan, that the élites of northern Italian cities in our period were divided into defined strata, ordines [orders], and were headed by military aristocrats defined by feudo-vassalic relationships and also different social origins: capitanei, who held fiefs from the local bishop and had private (signorial) lordships in the countryside, and valvassores, who were the vassals of the capitanei; there were also ‘citizens’, cives, among these élites, leading figures outside the narrower aristocratic hierarchy, but they were a minority in early communal leaderships, and anyway even men devoted to commercial activity could have vassal ties to the military ordines or to bishops.
This might not seem so controversial (I myself happily accepted it at the time, and still accept its main lines), but it coincided with an important and polemical article by Philip Jones on the ‘legend of the bourgeoisie’, generalised later in another large book, which argued—again among many other things—that Italian cities were not fully ‘civic’ in the ways in which medieval historians were accustomed to seeing them, and the importance of landowners in cities meant that the latter were long dominated by aristocratic values (the communes were ‘born seigneurial’); and Pierre Racine’s thèse on Piacenza, which proposed (and this did go too far) that early communes were so much under the control of landed aristocrats that they could be seen as a ‘seigneurie collective’, and were not really typologically distinct from signorial lordships in the countryside.
None of these historians were Italians, and their views did not by any means seem as useful to Italians in the 1980s as Keller’s conclusions did to me; Italians broadly, and not always helpfully, responded by stressing how ‘civic’ Italian cities were in all periods after all, and how different they were from the countryside, notwithstanding the attempts by foreigners to make them like northern Europe.
They also made some better-aimed points about Keller’s ‘society of orders’: that its two-fold nature did not characterise more than a minority of north Italian cities (and none in central Italy); that it was more rigid than it needed to be, as exactly who capitanei were and how they behaved was different from place to place; that aristocratic strata and episcopal vassals did not dominate early communes everywhere either; and that Keller had understressed the important fact, demonstrable for example in Milan … that there was quite a sharp difference between capitanei who were involved in city politics and members of the same ordo who were not—and that the former, although still episcopal vassals, were less interested in signorial rights and other elements of rural power, and much more interested in more ‘civic’ activities. One can accept most of these points without thinking any less of Keller’s book, but the debate leaves open some crucial issues as well, such as what exactly the ‘civic’ values of twelfth-century cities did consist of, if they were indeed so different from those of the countryside and of northern Europe. …
… [In a] more fully accepted work … on urban militias, in the twelfth and (especially) thirteenth centuries … Maire Vigueur argued that the political core of the commune across both centuries was not the military ordines as characterised by Keller (and plenty of other people), but, rather, the collectivity of mounted knights of every city, which extended far beyond a narrow set of feudo-vassalic aristocrats, to 10–15 percent of the urban population, and certainly included richer members of the commercial and artisanal strata, as well as judicial experts and notaries.
He argued for the twelfth century that the hegemony of this very wide militarised élite stratum produced a ‘very great stability and a very strong homogeneity of the class which governed the commune’ for the entire consular period, and that studying the … analyses of consuls produces ‘a feeling of boredom, an impression of déjà-vu’ because of the total homogeneity of the stratum, based as it always is on an ‘honest’ landed patrimony, tenurial links to local churches, and a tight set of kinship and business links to other consular families.
… I am sure, with Maire Vigueur, that the importance of feudal ties to bishops has been overplayed in communal analyses, and that communal activity belonged to a relatively wide stratum. I have my doubts about the total homogeneity of that stratum, however. As we shall see, it included, in each city, more diversity than that; and I shall stress in what follows a stratification inside it based on wealth, which in my view helps us to get closer to real social and political differences in the experiences of the early city communes …
… Let us pause on definitions for a moment. I have been referring to ‘aristocrats’ and to ‘élites’; I shall stick to ‘élites’ for the most part when talking about urban leaders, as it is suitably vague—it can certainly extend to all of Maire Vigueur’s urban militia—and will restrict references to the military ‘aristocracy’ to people who are definitely capitanei and their equivalents (though how rich they were, and how different they really were from leading cives, is another matter …
… But what about the word ‘commune’ itself? Scholars have traditionally regarded it as meaning the urban government of people called consules (the near-universal word for city rulers in north-central Italy by 1150, except in Rome, where senatores was preferred, and in Venice, where dukes remained central), and have tended to regard communes as starting with the first references to consuls—there is a well-known list of such first [11th century] references… But these references are all entirely chance citations, and consuls or their equivalents could have existed a long time earlier in most cases. As Keller has said, we do not know the date of the passage to a consular régime in a single Italian city.
[MH: Reminder, we still do not know what a ‘consul’ is in 12th century . See below.]
In addition, is the simple appearance of the word consul enough to mark a new form of government? Many early references to the word are to very generically defined figures, who may well have had no official status, as has been convincingly argued … So our evidence for consuls may have either preceded or succeeded the crystallisation of the ‘real’ commune, which also, as we have seen, was not called a commune in most cities until well into the twelfth century. Given that, how can a ‘real’ commune be characterised?
Put like this, it should be fairly clear that it is up to any historian to use the characterisation which s/he finds most useful. I would prefer to use, not a definition, but an ideal type, a collection of related elements which may not all be present in every city, but which, as a whole or in part, can be used to characterise and compare the city communal phenomenon from place to place. These would include in particular, for the Italian commune in its twelfth-century version: a conscious urban collectivity, which included all (male) city-dwellers or a substantial part of them, usually held together by oaths; a regularly rotating set of magistracies, chosen or at least validated by that collectivity (not … in any ‘democratic’ way, but at any rate not chosen by superior powers such as kings or bishops); and a de facto autonomy of action for the city and its magistrates, including in warfare and justice, and eventually taxation and legislation—the basic elements of early and central medieval government. Not all communes were in practice autonomous (e.g., from bishops), particularly at the start; and not all communes had magistrates regularly chosen or assented to from below… rather than … unhelpful arguments about whether a city without one element or another is ‘really’ a commune at all.
Nonetheless, it also allows one to see that a city with only a single one of these elements might not so usefully be compared with cities with most of them: a city with a community of the oath, for example, and no other autonomy could well be difficult to control … but found it hard indeed to maintain the continuous protagonism that annual magistrates and a city-based judicial remit would later bring; similarly, a wholly autonomous city which … firmly looked to a single ruler for life (as were both Rome and Venice before 1143) had a markedly different political practice from one where the rotation of powerful offices was already the norm.
Consuls [see below] were very widely accepted as city rulers in northern and central Italy by the 1150s. They are taken for granted as rulers in narratives of that decade, whether written by men holding communal office themselves … or by an [aristocratic] outsider [who was] unsympathetic … to early communal fiscal exactions; and the 1150s was also the decade in which Pisa took the important step of preparing the first version of a comprehensive local law-code, an undoubted claim for full practical autonomy. These are the main reasons why I will regard 1150 as an endpoint for my discussions, for communes were fully established in most major cities in north-central Italy, in one form or another, by then.
Earlier, it would depend on the city; but for me a crucially important marker is the appearance of regular consular judicial records, the first documents which show consuls or their representatives autonomously in action in any systematic way, sometimes describing themselves as electi a populo and similar phrases, significant ones for our recognition that this was a very different form of government from the traditional hierarchies of the Kingdom of Italy.
Such records also soon show a claim to legal supremacy over parties even if they did not consent to it (an important sign of legal authority), which is shown by the preparedness of consuls to reach judgements even when one of the parties did not appear in court. If so, the consolidation of a communal régime can be regarded as first attested in the 1130s in most of the precocious cities … Keller has argued for the 1120s–30s as the moment of the institutional crystallisation of communes, which fits these dates well enough, at least, again, for the earliest-established communes.
I would also prefer this to his other main argument … in which a collective oath of peace between the civitas (or populus) and the nobiles of the city, at the end of an urban uprising in 1044–45 against the aristocratic ordines and the archbishop, and then the punctuation of religious disputes among the Milanese populus by collective oaths (called iuramentum commune) in the 1060s and 1070s, are ‘primitive forms of communal organisation and self-government’; these oaths were too inchoate and ad hoc to be straightforward harbingers of a new political régime … But it must also be recognised from the outset that, if the full set of elements of my ideal-type commune only appear in most cities in the 1130s to 1150s, then this is rather later and slower than some other historians have argued, which has implications for our understandings of causation—and for the self-awareness of the people who moved these developments along.
A final element in this historiographical survey is a closely related point which I have argued myself, and which I wish to continue to develop here: that communes at their inception were very informal bodies.
They had, in the end, to become more formal, to replace the old formal hierarchies, public and private, of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world, which lost force, sometimes finally, with the civil wars of the late eleventh century; but that process was by no means immediate.
Consuls were creating a new structure, based on elements (such as collective oaths and rotating offices) which had never been used on their own for government before; their leaders were often from traditional élite families, who in the past had been in the entourages of kings or emperors, counts or dukes, or bishops, and will often have found the habitus of royal or episcopal courts and formalised placitum assemblies much more familiar and congenial than that of the city gatherings which marked the early communal period in most places.
Why would we assume that they had a clear and consistent idea of what they were doing? Why would we assume that they would automatically feel that ruling their peers, and those less powerful than they, would be more honorific than remaining in the traditional hierarchies accepted by their ancestors, which they were, indeed, sometimes still members of, again royal and episcopal ones above all? And why would we assume that, once consular systems were established, their leaders would recognise that this was The Future, and simply set about consolidating them? They were most likely making it up as they went along; they may well have thought of themselves as simply modifying earlier forms of political practice, and they may well have preferred to think this, too. Indeed, some consular régimes do not seem to have been permanent, or very high-profile, at the start; they were ‘latent’ in Giuliano Milani’s nice phrase … even the solidest régimes … developed very informally for a long time, adding on elements as they became necessary and possible … borrowing them from neighbours … (by 1200 most communes had very similar institutional structures), but proceeding along ad hoc paths at the start.
It can be added that those who led cities at the end of the eleventh century did not necessarily all want to become consuls at all. Links to kings and bishops, even if by now less power-enhancing on their own, could remain more attractive.
The Avvocati family in Lucca, for example, major city figures throughout the eleventh century, and the lay leaders of the city in the thirty years after 1080, do not appear among the city’s consuls in the first generation after their first real appearance in Lucca in 1119–20, but instead are attested as imperial representatives (missi), as ‘counts of the sacred palace’, an even higher-flown imperial title, and also as episcopal advocates (hence their later surname): these titles and roles seem to have been more prestigious than ‘mere’ consular office. Once the Lucchese consulate had fully stabilised, they did join it, but that was not until the 1150s. Perhaps they were the family who saw this period most clearly, whereas the actual consuls had less idea of what they were doing. … the Avvocati have plenty of parallels in the earliest communes elsewhere … And it is this initial, uncertain, informal period which I shall be concentrating on here, when city leaders of different types—and we shall look at a whole set of different types … were sleepwalking into a new and often radically different régime: all the while, for the most part, pretending that they were doing nothing of the kind.
Chapter 2 Milan
Milan … was powerful and influential in central northern Italy (in the region now called Lombardy, and indeed farther afield), and held the attention of contemporary observers, as also of the historians of the last century and more. Recent historians have, indeed, often seen it as typical; we therefore have to understand how its development did work if we want to call that into question. …
… Documents in the period after 1080 which list the composition of the main figures in the last Milanese placita (the last known is from 1093) and the archbishop’s court show us a mixed élite in the city and around the archbishop. It was both aristocratic and judicial in composition: the vicecomites or Visconti … all families who are elsewhere described as capitaneal; and a smaller set of iudices et missi, whose legal expertise was recognised by an official imperial title and whose local political position was central—above all, three frequently recurring figures, Alberto, the patriotically named Mediolano Ottone, and Ambrogio Pagano. …
Then, in 1097, a Cremona document shows us a formal agreement after a land dispute (we cannot tell whether it went to a placitum or not) which was made in Milan in consulatu civium, ‘in the consulate of the citizens’, for the first time. This was witnessed by an array of members of prominent families, including Arialdo da Melegnano again, Wifredo da Pusterla, and Anselmo Fanti, all of whom are known to have been capitanei, by Pagano Stampa, who was from a family of vassals of the monastery of S. Ambrogio, so was certainly aristocratic too, as well as by the three iudices, but now the group also included Pagano and Nazario Gambari, from a family which was not aristocratic but would be active in the city later in the twelfth century. We cannot tell whether these names were or included people called consuls in 1097, but the same sort of people seem to be associated with the consulatus … in archiepiscopal documents, with, now, the addition of some prominent cives.
We need to pause here, however, and consider what the word consulatus could have meant.
It clearly indicates that Milan now used the term consul, although it does not appear again in any other text for twenty years, until 1117. The word was previously used in Rome and then, in the 1080s, in Pisa, but early uses of consul there simply referred to members of urban élites, and certainly not yet regularly rotating city rulers as developed in the twelfth century … That Milan had done this by 1097 is indeed not surprising; already two important rural centres (or small towns) in the wider hinterland of Milan, Biandrate and Chiavenna, had prominent men called consules in this period, in 1093 and 1097 respectively. [FOOTNOTE: “here consules are set up by the counts and milites of Biandrate to police the agreement between them and minor disputes”]
But a consulatus is something else as well, and arguably more important: it is a collectivity of people, an assembly (and also the place where such a collectivity met). As such, it looks back to the assemblies (then sometimes called collectio) of the 1040s, and to the oath-based groupings … but the phrase in 1097 indicates that such an assembly was by now a more formalised and more regular occasion. It is also striking that in the immediately following years, 1098– 1100, we have two texts—one surviving in an inscription, the other in a later copy—in each of which Archbishop Anselmo IV da Bovisio, who had been elected in 1097, founds a market and gives it toll exemptions with comuni conscilio tocius civitatis, ‘the common counsel of the whole city’, such consilium in the second text being given in a conventus, another word for assembly. Such an assembly appears in Landolfo of S. Paolo’s narrative too: in his text for 1103 it is called a concio, and in 1117 an arengo …
… This multiplicity of names implies that we should not put too much weight on the implications of the single term consulatus, but it certainly shows that the city’s assembly was by now an organised body … to act closely with the archbishop, and with a demonstrably aristocratic element in 1097, but probably meeting autonomously, and also fairly often.
Urban assemblies can be tracked back to the ninth century; cities, or their élites, wished to express their will in public in every period, and this was a good way of doing it. Such assemblies had some parallels to the judicial assemblies of the placita, for obvious reasons, but they did not have the formalised public role that placita did; in particular, even if dominated by urban élites in practice, they were as yet ad hoc, not part of the public political hierarchy of the Kingdom of Italy, and were not headed or called by counts or missi or other royal or imperial representatives. They appear only occasionally, and particularly at times of crisis, as the 1040s surely were.
But from the late 1090s in Milan they appear much more often; and their practical powers in the next decade or two became ever clearer … To repeat, the role of the assembly to ratify a settlement in 1097 implies that its role was by now in some way formalised. Why then?
It was a decade of apparent calm in the city for the most part; whether or not the assembly (let alone its shadowy consular leaders) was the result of ‘compromise’, in Milan it seems to have appeared in a period of renewed and uncontested hierarchy inside the city, around traditional authorities—archbishops and their senior clergy and vassals, in particular. Milan itself was stable then, that is to say. …
… But the wider context of 1097 in Italy was still one of continued civil war and political uncertainty; and it is not chance that the placitum tradition had by now ended in the city. In the absence of public judicial assemblies, the city’s own gatherings gained more of a formal status in their place, and, increasingly, definable powers as well, as a defensive measure we can indeed say, even if in an environment when archiepiscopal authority was not any more—and not yet—in dispute. This is important. Not as a step towards ‘the commune’, for only a few elements of the ideal type I characterised in the last chapter are as yet visible here, and indeed the institutionalisation of the powers of ruling consuls was a much later process, as we shall see; but as a sign of a new local structuring of urban political action, in a period in which the wider institutions of the Kingdom were in increasing disarray.
Chapter 3 Pisa
… Henry IV’s 1081 diploma to the Pisans has always been seen as a founding charter by historians of the communal movement, and it is certainly the case that the Pisans benefited greatly from its terms, especially in trading privileges … the document … refers to the communis consensus of the cives, which was needed for anyone wishing to pull down houses in the city, to the Pisan consuetudines de mari, ‘sea customs’, which the emperor recognised, and to a newly legitimised local control over common lands, which were economically very important around Pisa, set in the Arno marshes as it was … for timber for shipbuilding … The city existed as a collectivity, then: it consisted of the ‘faithful citizens’, undifferentiated by social group, to whom Henry addressed his diploma.
This, to modern Pisan historians, goes rather well with the first-ever reference to Italian city consuls. This is a document of 1080–85 in which one of the Sardinian rulers, Mariano I iudice or king of Torres, frees his Pisan ‘friends’, ammicos from all trading tolls and gives them judicial privileges, ‘for the honour of Bishop Gelardu, viscount Ocu, and all the consuls, consolos, of Pisa’.
The ammicos are then listed; they are from the leading families visible in the marchesal placita, and their heirs will often become consuls of the city commune. This document has … is less clearly part of the ‘move to the commune’ than people often claim. It does not by any means show that consuls were at that point the city’s formal rulers, or indeed that the word consolos denoted any official position; it seems simply to mean members of the city’s élite, and is in this context a synonym of the ammicos.
This is no less the case with the poem on the Mahdīya campaign, which features two Pisans called principales consules and two called cives nobiles, acting together as military leaders: these men are all or mostly again from the same group of leading families, and we cannot distinguish … between the consules and the nobiles.
We cannot, indeed, track any formal lay leadership in the city in the 1080s; even the viscounts are not so prominent in our texts that we could be sure of their directive role … We have a sense of a body of prominent citizens acting collectively, but that is all. …
… At least one element of the period, on the other hand, really is clear: the stability of Pisa’s ruling élite. Of the 144 consuls documented between 1109 and 1150, 89 came from just sixteen families, nearly two-thirds. Of these families, twelve are already documented as attending the marchesal placita of 1063–77. That is a notable continuity. It indicates that the Pisan élite were successful in ruling whatever system came their way; Pisan political power was simply not contested in the same way as it was in Milan. This was not the continuity of ‘compromise’, which has been seen as a key to communal origins; there was no need for compromise here—and even if this élite briefly divided … in the 1080s, each side got back together again by 1090, without the need to compromise on anything except the heights of tower-houses.
But who were this élite? Fortunately, a generation of Pisan students have devoted their undergraduate theses to exactly this issue, the reconstruction of consular families, under the guidance of some of the University’s leading historians, so we can give an answer to that.
The first thing to say here is that in Pisa, as in Milan, there were half a dozen important families who were not particularly interested in consular office. They were in every case castle-owning families, and we could well see them, once again, as families which saw themselves in some way as too important for the commune, until well after our period ends. This is all the more likely in that most of them seem to have lived in the city much of the time; unlike for Milan, purely rural lords were almost non-existent here. … This set of families anyway did not contain any significant opponents of the commune and of city power over its contado. …
… The other significant point that we gain from these biographies is about the status of judicial expertise. In Milan, from the 1140s onwards, the commune was very largely run by iudices, who did not have much land but instead had considerable, and growing, juristic training: not only Oberto dell’Orto, but many of his colleagues as well. I characterised them as a ‘medium élite’, a third stratum of landowners, who nonetheless came to be accepted as prominent in the Lombard commune. In Pisa, this did not occur …
… We have to do, then, with a cohesive and economically defined urban élite in Pisa, wealthy by Pisan standards but not wealthy enough to compete with rural lords on a castle-holding level, and it was that élite, above all, which had to confront the problems of the end of the eleventh century and onwards. In the 1080s, in the civil war period, that élite may have split in two, and thus perhaps had less group protagonism, temporarily; the body that formalised itself to confront the power-vacuum was the city assembly, in which members of the élite, as army leaders and sapientes and consules, had a relatively informal leadership role. …
… In Pisa, indeed, the ruling families had chosen urban power at least in part because rural power was unavailable to them; conversely, inside the city, if they could no longer rule a wider collectivity as part of a vertical hierarchy leading upwards to kings and marquises, then at least they could rule it—with less difficulty than in Milan— through the assent of its members, through horizontal and eventually bottom-up links. …
Chapter 5 Italy
… The typology of different patterns of communal development which these different examples show is not a simple one. It is not helped by the wide variation in the density of documentation for each city, and the even wider quality of the studies of the early commune in each. …
… … [We] cannot simply use the appearance of consuls as a metonym for the appearance of any fully fledged commune; there are several examples of cities with early ‘consuls’ but few signs of communal institutions, particularly not regularised communal court proceedings, until well after our period ends …
This picture, of—to put it very schematically—the moves towards the commune spreading from the ports to Lombardy-Emilia and then slowly outwards from there [is] qualified by the sharp differences in other aspects of communal orientation … the varying degrees to which communes formed around a signorial element in the episcopal clientele from Milan … the archetype of the episcopal or signorial commune … in the 1110s–20s … where the bishop was important but his urban clients were markedly less signorial, to Asti, Cremona, Rome, and most of the Tuscan cities, where (either because the bishop was too strong or because he was too weak) city leaders were not closely associated with him at all.
But we have seen other sorts of distinction which can be made too: for example in the importance in the communal leadership of judicial figures, often not very substantial landowners, which is particularly visible in Milan after the 1130s, but can also be seen—again in varying ways—in Cremona, Padua, Vercelli, Bologna, Pavia, and (but only initially) Pisa and Lucca. The different pacing of the different elements of the ideal-type commune—assemblies, consuls with rotating offices, regularised court proceedings, legislation—also varied very greatly from city to city; only military commitment was there in every case from the start.
The degree to which communes were contested also varied. Setting aside the early eleventh-century … evidence of often violent hostility between the city’s community and traditional powers (in each case bishops), in the decades in which the first elements of communal activity and identity come into vision. It is fairly easy to see why the high-handedness of bishops might have produced this in these cases; it is rather harder to see why it did not in other cities, which often (Milan is only one out of many) had prelates which were just as overbearing … We are not going to get very far with a generalised pattern of causation here, then, but it is worth at least stressing that two of the three, Rome and Cremona, are joined by a result: they each show evidence of an opening to a rather wider array of social strata in the makeup of their early communal leadership, extending in each case not only to the ‘medium élite’, but to non-élites too.
The need to oppose traditional authority could, in some cases, break down long-ingrained assumptions about which sorts of social group could exercise power.
If we want to look for the root causes of communal differences, we run into problems of evidence very quickly. But … one important element seems to me to be the way the different leading strata of each city related to each other, inside a common élite (or militia) identity, in their involvement in the early commune. …
… I have stressed the difference between three levels of the élite, a richer and usually more signorial first level, a prosperous second level without castles (and, if with fiefs, only of land or, sometimes, tithes), and a third level of a ‘medium élite’ with distinctly less land.
If we take the cities of communal Italy as a whole in the early twelfth century, we find one clear pattern: the group which made up early consuls was overwhelmingly associated with the second level as defined here. This must have been the political core of the cavalry militia of each city, and this trend fully justifies Maire Vigueur’s characterisation of them … as having a homogeneously ‘honest’ landed patrimony. The only clear exceptions are two of our case studies, Rome, where the third level dominated, with links to non-élite families, and Milan, where, even if power after the 1130s was held by all three strata,‘medium-élite’ judi- cial families were very prominent indeed. This seems to me an important basis for considering our city élites as a group; the homogeneity visible here seems to me at least as important as the best-studied difference between them, the degree to which this stratum was in each city associated, whether feudally or otherwise, with the local bishop.
All the same, differences come with the more delicate … information we have as to which social strata this second level most closely associated itself … above all because very many of the families of the second stratum were actively pursuing signorial rights …
[MH: Many examples—omitted here—of complex combinations and differences among the three broad ‘levels’ of interests or families mentioned above.]
… The micro-analysis of different internal social structures which I have just summarised seems to me the best way forward here. …
But we must, equally, turn the argument back round to similarities. … We… need to end this discussion by trying to see how and why, despite this range of very diverse experience, there were also common trends across so much of the peninsula. Here I will start by focussing on the importance of assemblies …
… I have laid stress on assemblies, as the main form of formalised city activity to appear in the 1090s in both Milan and Pisa, well before the development of an organised consular leadership.
I argued … it was assemblies, not ‘the commune’, which were the main form of defensive reaction to the crisis of the Kingdom of Italy in the 1080s and onwards, and that defined consular leaderships appeared later … as it turned out to develop quite quickly into an institution … which would last. …
… What emerges here is a fairly clear pattern; the earliest documented communes did indeed, for the most part, have an assembly before—in some cases decades before—they developed a consular leadership in any organised way. The proposition that assemblies formalised themselves out of preexisting practices of [political] action to face a power-vacuum in the Kingdom does thus have some wider support.
Cities began at least sometimes to call themselves ‘communes’, as a noun [in the 1110s, more or less] … The appearance of rotating city office-holders called consuls, whose remit was to rule the city, was only one among these developments; one of the most important… What was happening here was in its essence a steady process of the formalisation of aspects of autonomous city government. First, the assembly became a formal body, in a period when its leaders were still defined fairly casually, as sapientes or boni homines (or indeed, often, consules), and were also uncertain of the nature of their power and of the social status attached to it …
… Only subsequently did leaders gain definition, and also clearly defined temporary periods of office … and … a newly city-focussed legal system … sometimes run directly by the consuls … sometimes assigned to less prominent people … It was usually then that we begin to find the terminology of the ‘public’ used by cities, too, although even informal leaders had been in most cases acting for the whole city from the start: informal leadership did not mean incomplete power, still less power which needed to be legally validated from outside.
It is hardly surprising … that this formalisation was differently configured in each city, especially given the differences in the social structures of élites which I have just characterised. …
… This structural overview can be presented chronologically … [with] a fair degree of speculation … Before the 1080s, cities were fully integrated into the Kingdom of Italy. They had sometimes revolted, against king-emperors or bishops, and were occasionally divided by religious conflict, but their leading groups were fully part of traditional hierarchies … with regular appearances in public placita, and feudal or clientelar ties to counts and bishops. …
… When the civil wars began, the two great port cities, Pisa and Genoa …had to respond collectively to political divisions which threatened to pull each city apart, and they could respond relatively quickly, for they were used to organising offensive maritime war; by the 1090s each had an active assembly. Their leading élites were already called consules, and the challenges of continuing war (the First Crusade, and then struggles against rural lords and rival cities) allowed these leaders to crystallise into a formalised ruling group with judicial authority, already by 1110.
… [Inland] in the royal heartland around Pavia and Milan, there was also near-continuous war … and also in some cities … an internal power-vacuum, so assemblies had to develop to organise local society in a more formal way. But bishops were here in most places still hegemonic, and urban leaderships were often happy to remain inside their clientele, aspiring as they did to status and power which was figured in very traditional terms.
Here we see city élites making do, probably both through the urban assembly and with the help of bishops, in decades when something had to be done to keep things going in the absence of other, older institutions. By around 1110 however, in Lombardy-Emilia at least, the challenges of ruling a city, the process of making do in a slightly more peaceful period but still one with no wider ruler with a permanent presence, gave urban leaders, here too increasingly called consuls, more need to present themselves as acting politically on behalf of their cities. The 1110s show that … consuls could routinely write letters in the name of cities, run wars for them, make formal transactions for them. All the same, they had no real institutional basis, and in a city like Milan they were not separate from the archbishop and his aristocratic entourage; it was indeed not the consuls (or the archbishop) in Milan … but the … city assemblies in the region which made many of the principal deals with rural lords and small towns.
… [In] the 1130s–40s, simple routine allowed the rule of consuls to become more institutionalised, and copied in more and more parts of northern Italy. As we have seen, turning the formal assembly and its leadership into a governing structure, with rules and a greater organisation of power, was not necessarily by now in response to any vacuum of power.
It was more a question of leaders taking on and regularising the power they had gained. And from now on, too, wars between cities became more and more common, which in itself could make a more solid power for city leaders more necessary. … And the 1130s were a particularly bad time for wars …
… Whatever one thinks of the virtues of communes, one can hardly deny that the level of violence between cities across north-central Italy was substantially greater in this period, for city leaderships, as prickly in their honour as any signorial lord, showed themselves to be remarkably intolerant of their neighbours, and ever less keen to compromise with them; we indeed see here the start of the hegemony of the war-making mounted militia …
… The contrast with the relative calm of the Kingdom of Italy must have been only too obvious to at least older contemporaries. The role of consuls was also by now not only political or military leadership, but had extended to cover urban dispute-settlement; when the Veneto cities adopted consular leaderships from this period onwards, they came with a more stable communal, public, legal practice …
Even now, however, in most places élites probably still thought they were simply filling gaps in a (possibly temporarily) failing system; only later would it have become clear that they were creating a fundamentally new one. City communes … did not have to be very proactive … or very developed governmentally … or even autonomous … All the same, the 1130s–40s, and not earlier, is where the fulcrum of communal developments comes: where consular government was increasingly stable, increasingly institutionalised, increasingly hegemonic even in cities with strong bishops.
… Whatever consuls thought they were doing, they did not … see themselves as contributing to the establishment of a new world. The grand narrative of Italian exceptionalism, focussed on city-states, which generates a triumphalist tone when consuls are at last visible in our documents … was in reality a sequence of chances, of roads taken by people whose heads were turned in often opposite directions.
[In] Rome … the senate was certainly a conscious creation, but if the aristocratic consuls of the previous decades had ended up creating a durable city government as they did elsewhere, steadily but far less consciously, such a government would doubtless still have used the same backward-looking, and traditionally Roman, imagery of renovatio with the same degree of enthusiasm. … These people did not know what they were doing; or, to the extent that they did, were cloaking their actions, even to themselves, in imagery which belonged to other political systems.
… In our period … communal leaders were sleepwalking. … [Their] ancestors … had ‘really’ run most of the now-defunct public institutions of previous generations.
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
Currently researching Type 7 society (Europe in the Middle Ages) and the transition to Type 8 (England), with regular backflips to Type 5 (Rome) and Type 6 (Empire) for perspective.