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Sleepwalking Into a New World
The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century
By Chris Wickham PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6582-6
CHAPTER 1
COMMUNES
In 1117, after a great earthquake which devastated northern Italy, the archbishop of Milan and the consuls of the same city—the city's leaders—called the people of other northern cities and their bishops to a great meeting in Milan, in the Broletto, an open space beside Milan's two cathedrals, now part of the Piazza del Duomo. There, in the words of an eyewitness, the chronicler Landolfo of S. Paolo, writing two decades later:
The archbishop and the consuls set up two theatra [stages]; on one the archbishop with the bishops, abbots and leading churchmen stood and sat; in the other the consuls with men skilled in laws and customs. And all around them were present an innumerable multitude of clerics and the laity, including women and virgins, expecting the burial of vices and the revival of virtues.
It seems that this meeting was called in response to the earthquake, and Landolfo mentions shortly after 'the whole people congregated there out of fear of the ruin of the rubble, so that they could hear mass and preaching'; it was also, however, seen as a moment in which people could ask for justice, and Landolfo himself was there to seek restitution, for he had recently been expelled from the church (S. Paolo) of which he was the priest and part owner. He failed in that; his enemy Archbishop Giordano was never going to let him have his church back, and nor (although with less venom) would his successors. Landolfo's remarks about the revival of virtues should be read as sarcasm, in that context. But his image of the set-piece meeting with its stages is a striking one; and so is the image of the separation of powers, the Church on one stage, the consuls and men of law on the other.
This narrative can be set against a document from July of the same year, surviving in a contemporary copy, stating that 'in the public arengo [perhaps in the same open space] in which was lord Giordano, archbishop of Milan, and there with him his priests and clerics of the major and minor orders of the church of Milan, in the presence of the Milanese consuls and with them many of the capitanei and vavassores [the two orders of the Lombard military aristocracy] and populus', the consuls of Milan decided a court case brought there by the bishop of the neighbouring and now-subject city of Lodi. This is only the second text which mentions consuls in Milan at all, and the first in which the consuls are actually namednineteen of them—and shown acting in a judicial role. Landolfo's account and the consular document seem to refer, if not to the same assembly, at least to rapidly succeeding versions of the same occasion, and thus reinforce each other: the one showing a highly orchestrated event, the other showing its effective legal content. And they have also been seen—and heavily emphasised—as a pair ever since modern historiography began to concern itself with the origins of Italian city communes, which in the case of Milan goes back to Giorgio Giulini in the 1760s: in this dramatic moment, we can see the consuls of Milan begin to take on their new and future role as urban rulers, and Italian history took a decisive new path from then on.
In what follows, I intend to nuance that moment, quite considerably. But let us begin by looking briefly at why the moment, and the new régime, has such historiographical importance. There are two contexts for this, seen very broadly, one Italian and one international (including, not least, American). For professional historians in Italy, the role of the middle ages in the grand narrative of the past was never that of the origins of the modern state, as in most of western Europe (or else its regrettable failure in Germany), but, rather, the victory of the autonomous city states over external domination, which made possible the civic culture of the Renaissance; indeed, external rule was only part of it, for Italians tended until recently to regard the genuine state-building of Norman and Angevin southern Italy as a wasted opportunity and the origin of southern 'backwardness', in that it undermined urban autonomy there. The city was the principio ideale, the 'ideal principle' of Italian history, in Carlo Cattaneo's famous image of the 1850s, in the run-up to the Risorgimento. When the moment was which first produced urban autonomy was therefore of very great interest and importance for the historical community, and the moto associativo, the 'associative movement', which led to autonomous collectivities was a core focus of study, particularly in the decades around 1900, the period when scientific history developed in Italy. Indeed, its more-than-scientific emotional force meant that debates about the nature of medieval civic collectivity soon became metaphors for the main political and cultural battlegrounds of early twentieth-century Italian history; medieval historians were important in the socialist and fascist movements, in the Crocean idealist community, and also in the slower-burning clerical movement which would end up as Christian Democracy after World War II. One would think that this would mean that the subject was fully studied; that has unfortunately not been the result (I will come back to this), but its centrality remains taken for granted in Italy.
As for the international interest in the subject, this was associated, from Burckhardt through to US Western Civ, with the Renaissance too, although here also with the addition of the supposed democratic, or at least republican, nature of the Italian communes, as a contribution to the origins of modernity. As the historian of Venice Frederic C. Lane said to the American Historical Association in 1965, 'My thesis here is that republicanism, not capitalism, is the most distinctive and significant aspect of these Italian city-states; that republicanism gave to the civilization of Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century its distinctive quality.... The attempt to revive the culture of the ancient city-states strengthened in turn the republican ideal and contributed mightily to its triumph in modern nations and primarily in our own'. The US focus on the history of the Renaissance, which remains so strong, derives from both these strands. The experience of the Italian communes has also been used surprisingly often as a point of reference by nonmedievalists, as with the US sociologist Robert Putnam's influential co-authored book, Making Democracy Work, which attributes all contemporary civic solidarity in Italy to the influence of the Italian communes and their 'collaborative solutions to their Hobbesian dilemmas' in the eleventh century, or, in the UK, Quentin Skinner's well-known survey The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which simply starts, without qualification, with the early Italian consulates, in a chapter titled 'The Ideal of Liberty'. These two important scholars have, I have to add, been content to get their information about communal Italy from fairly basic textbooks, but the Italian communes, and more widely the Italian city-states, have a notable place in their story-lines about what each sees as modernity.
I could lengthen this list, but there is probably no need. The point is that the Italian communes have been widely used, often without much detailed thought, 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. This sort of interpretation to me is fundamentally mistaken, as are all teleological readings of history. But 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. 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/emperors, as part of a coherent Kingdom of Italy. 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. 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? 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. I have thus chosen to focus on three case studies, which are in each case characterised both by a relatively good set of documents (usually land transactions) and a varied set of narratives, the dialectic between which may get us somewhere towards the problem as I have posed it: Milan, Pisa, and Rome. They are in fact the best three cities in Italy for such a pairing. Genoa might have been a fourth, but its earliest evidence is too sketchy—as we shall see (pp. 162– 66) in the fifth chapter here, which contains a briefer overview of other Italian cities, so as to locate the three in their wider typicalities and atypicalities. My three chosen cities are also well-studied, but these studies do not fully focus on the issues which most concern me here. Milan and Pisa are relatively often compared (largely because the University of Pisa hired several historians from Milan in the 1960s); Rome is seldom brought into the equation, however, and will be a useful contrast to and control on the other two. It is a mantra that every Italian city is different, and this is undoubtedly true, but the different experiences shown by each of these three have obvious parallelisms as well, and thus will go some way towards creating the sort of indirect, glancing picture of the way people made choices, which is the best the evidence can offer us. I am by training a social historian, so I am more experienced in analysing the results of such choices and the patterns they make than the mental processes involved, but those processes are crucial too, and I wish to set them out as clearly as I can.
Before we look at concrete examples in the next chapters, however, we need to look at the historiographical frame for how to analyse communes in more detail as it has emerged in the last generation; this is important to set out, in order to show where I am following others (including my own previous work) and where I am not.
* * *
The quantity of detailed and comparative Italian scholarship on early communes has not been as substantial as one would think. For a long time Italians concentrated on their immediate antecedents, and when consuls appeared they perhaps thought their job was done; for example, the leading Italian historians of the generation before this one, Giovanni Tabacco and Cinzio Violante, did most of their empirical work on the period before the late eleventh century. In the last forty years, however, although the number of studies is still not huge (except for monographic analyses of individual cities, which are plentiful; but these do not often use their empirical data as a basis for wider rethinking), some important work has changed our view of what happened across the period 1050– 1150 quite considerably.
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 (Rome was the major exception here; see below, pp. 174, 184, for others), 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 appeared, historians often now say, in the context not of contestation but of compromise: 10 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.
As we shall see, I will call some of the detail of that defensive reaction into question, to an extent; all the same, 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 been rather comfortable as a result, and has stressed how the real sources of political power did not change at all with the early communes. In favour of such continuitist readings are some unproblematic findings, such as (as Ottavio Banti showed) that 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, 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sleepwalking Into a New World by Chris Wickham. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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