No More Learning

The break-down of the institutions of the ancient Empire was of
necessity far more complete in the territory conquered by the Lombards,
which accounted for the greater part of Italy. The Lombards came as
barbaric enemies of Rome; they replaced Roman organisation by simpler
institutions of their own. Here and there so-called curiales or similar
officials might exist as petty tax-gatherers and notaries. Here and there
might continue a trade-corporation, like the soap-makers of Piacenza
who at some time before 744 were paying annually thirty pounds of soap
to the king. The number of survivals may be increased by turther research.
But in general the elaborate Roman administration disappeared. It could
hardly be otherwise. Depopulated and in stagnation, with the self-
sufficing great estate or curtis as the typical economic unit, with the
mass of the population aldii or half-free peasants, with the growing class
of Roman freemen in the towns for long officially ignored by the Arian
Lombards, only the most elementary and hardiest Roman organisations
could be expected to survive. Some such, however, there were, and the
course of time increased their importance. From the first the towns could
not be deprived of their position as economic centres of their surrounding
countryside ; the curtis often had surplus produce to dispose of; Roman
crafts were torpid, not dead—the Lombard merchant and the Italian
shipwright became known abroad. The conversion of the Lombards to
Catholicism, and the inevitable intermixture of race, ended in the official
recognition of Roman as well as Lombard law by the time of Liutprand
(712-744), and the ranking of freemen in the army on a pure propert
basis by King Aistulf in 750.
It is in close connexion with their ecclesiastical arrangements, them-
selves founded on the civil organisation of the falling Empire, that we
find the earliest germs of the later North Italian communes. The diocese
corresponded usually with the Roman civitas, the unit of secular admini-
stration. The largest subdivision of the diocese was the plebs or pieve,
presided over by its archpriest and having its centre in the baptismal
church (ecclesia), in which alone for long the chief rites of religion could
be performed. The plebs was in its turn subdivided. In the country it
was a collection of villages each of which in time had its own oratory
(capella) and bore, at least later, some such name as vicinantia. The
bishop's city, however, with its suburb stretching a mile or so beyond
the walls, formed a plebs by itself, a fact of which the baptisteries of
Italian cities still remind us. Its subdivisions, or parishes in modern


## p. 211 (#257) ############################################

Ecclesiastical institutions
211
language, each with its capella, formed the vicinantiae, populi, or contratae
of the city. A vicinantia in town or country usually possessed, or had
the use of, common lands, pasture and wood, as an economic necessity,
and the meeting of the vicini (parishioners, neighbours) perhaps round
the village elm or at the door of the capella to arrange such matters can
hardly ever have gone out of use. To this day the use of certain Alpine
pastures is managed by similar meetings of the hereditary users'. Nor
in such meetings can the personal status of the vicini have formed a bar
to participation. Later under the communes the vicinantiae were to play
a part in the city-administration. In the country the plebs had at least
its little market for exchange on holy days before its ecclesia, and often,
it seems, the use of common lands to manage in customary fashion.
But in the towns we see an intermediate and purely secular subdivision,
the quarters or gates (portae), going back to Roman times. The first
duty of the quarter was the repair and guarding of the walls, or that
share of the work (one-third) which did not fall on the State or the
Church. The city plebs, too, was not without its assembly and its
elementary functions. There were common lands of the city needing
some management. There were proclamations to be made, public burdens
perhaps to be apportioned, as in the country. As early as Rothari's time
(636-652), strayed animals were cried in the conventus ante ecclesiam,
And perhaps there was the election of a bishop or the alienation of
church-lands to be formally approved. In Carolingian times we find
sure evidence of the existence and occasional activity of this city-assembly
in Lombard Italy. About 790 Charlemagne’s son Pepin of Italy forbade
the men of Piacenza to receive aldii in the city by their decree (prae-
ceptum); and at Piacenza the general assembly (contio) long met in front
of the old cathedral of Sant'Antonino, a proof of the assembly's exist-
ence before the new cathedral of Santa Giustina was built in 877.
Two features with far-reaching effects characterised the assembly.
First, it was composed of dwellers within the walls alone. Even if this
character does not go back to late Roman times, the fact that in the
suburb outside the walls there would be in depopulated Lombard Italy
but scattered hamlets at most would sufficiently account for it. Its im-
portance needs no stressing. The walled city, forming a separate plebs,
exceptional in population, duties, and power, is the starting-point of the
urban Italian commune, cut off from the countryside and, apart from
the State-administration, possessing as its ultimate authority a general
1 Cf. A. Serpieri, Studio sui pascoli alpini della Svizzera, pp. 185-8; at
Cortina certain hereditary groups each dispose of the usufruct of a portion of the
alp, and elect their officers in a meeting of the group in front of the church.
F. Schneider, Die Entstehung von Burg und Landgemeinde in Italien, would apparently
restrict the managing use of common lands to the settlements of Arimanni, i. e. in
this connexion, free warriors specially assigned to the frontier-strips or other
garrison-duty. But his evidence is insufficient.
CA. V.
14-2


## p. 212 (#258) ############################################

212
Development under the Carolingian Empire
assembly of the city dwellers. Secondly, there is the close connexion of
the city with its bishop. Protector of the plain subject in late Roman
times, head of his Catholic flock while the Lombards were still Arian,
chief citizen and a public official under the Carolingians, surrounded by
a throng of vassals in town and country, it was the bishop, whether much
or little privileged, who brought the formless assembly and the elementary
machinery of quarters and vicinanze into working order as a substitute
for decaying government. How strong the feeling of city unity was, and
how intimately linked with the city's church, is seen as early as 715
when the dispute over the diocesan boundaries of Siena and Arezzo led
to armed conflict between the two cities in which the Sienese people
appear as a self-acting body.
The effect of the strictly Carolingian period was to intensify the
existing current of development. Freemen, whether Frank, Lombard,
or Roman, or of some other race or personal law, were privileged according
to their rank in society, not by their racial descent, although the offspring
of Germanic conquerors were naturally still predominant among them.
And a mixed customary law, containing elements both Lombard and
Roman, was evidently growing up locally even in the vicinanze, and even
among a serf-population. The loci consuetudo had been already acknow-
ledged by King Rothari, and King Liutprand in 727 admitted its mingled,
local, and popular character. The development of such local usus terrae
in the towns at least must have been assisted, and the training of
the notables in law and government must have been increased, by
Charlemagne's institution of the scabini'. These law-experts and life-
assessors in judgment, chosen totius populi consensu? by the missi, pro-
duced a competent professional class of lawyers among the very men
who would naturally take the lead in the affairs of the city and its
church.
A far more powerful impulse, however, towards city-autonomy, was
given by the disasters of Italy during the age of anarchy following the
deposition of Charles the Fat in 887. The civil wars, the weakening of
the degenerate kingship, the rapid changes among the provincial wielders
of the public power, left the state unable to exercise its rights, to levy its
dues, or to protect its miserable subjects. Against the Hungarian or
Saracen ravagers the only sure defence lay in the guard of the walled
towns or castles by their inhabitants. Castra (castelli) began to spring
up in the countryside through the unprompted co-operation of the neigh-
bouring population, who would there find a place of refuge for themselves
and their property. The cities were similarly a place of refuge, but their
defence fell on the permanent inhabitants, whose organisation of quarters
(portae) and vicinantiae regained for military purposes its full significance.
1 See supra, Vol. 11, Chap. xxi, p. 668.
Capitulare Wormatiense, A. D. 829, MGH, Capit. 11, p. 15.
2


## p. 213 (#259) ############################################

Fortification of the cities: episcopal government
213
A song of the city-watch has been transmitted to us from this time,
a prelude in Latin of Italian verse.
“Fortis iuventus, virtus audax bellica,
vestra per muros audiantur carmina :
et sit in armis alterna vigilia
ne fraus hostilis haec invadat moenia. ”1
It was the bishop who appeared at the head of his fellow-citizens (concives)
in this work of co-operation and defence. Thus in 904 King Berengar
permits Hildegar, Bishop of Bergamo, and his concives to guard against
the heathen raids and the oppression of the great nobles by rebuilding
the city walls and towers, and in the same diploma to the bishop and his
see were granted those walls and the public jurisdiction within them.
Other grants of the kind were to follow. Under the Holy Roman
Emperors it was the public policy to hand over the comital powers in
cities and a radius round them to their bishops. But how much these
grants merely ratified an existing or impending situation is seen in Tuscany,
where few bishops obtained them yet all were closely concerned with the
dawn of city-autonomy. Looking from above, the Emperor let slip
powers of his own or of the great vassals into the hands of his own
episcopal nominees who could effectively administer them. Looking from
below, the city notables obtained a greater voice in the city government
through its formal conferment on their episcopal chief, of whom they
were the customary and recognised councillors and generally the vassals.
In spite of the disasters of the times, the effort for self-defence and
the restoration of the walls, not to mention the acquisition of local State-
administrative powers by rulers on the spot, could not fail to promote
the prosperity of the cities. Their population, too, must have increased,
if only owing to the inrush of refugees who did not always return to their
ruined homes in the countryside ; while, after the Ottos had excluded
heathen ravage, their progress was comparatively rapid. It is natural
that we should trace signs of greater civic self-consciousness and self-
dependence in the larger and wealthier centres. In Milan this took an
ecclesiastical form. The townsmen fought for five years (948-953) in
support of the canonically-elected Adalman against the royal nominee
Manasse, who was favoured by the nobles of the countryside. The same
people c. 980 shew a more pronounced communal spirit when they drove
out their archbishop, the tyrannous great noble Landolf II, and only
received him again after a battle and a treaty. Considerable must have
been the internal cohesion of the city and of its rudimentary organisation
to enable its notables to enter even into an informal contract. And their
collective character was gaining some sort of recognition too from the
royal government. It was to his subjects and inhabitants of Genoa, with
no mention of bishop, count, or marquess, that Berengar II in 958 con-
1 MGH, Poetae Carolini aevi, ni, pp. 703–5.
CH. V.


## p. 214 (#260) ############################################

1
214
Growth of collective action
firmed their local customs and privileges; and when Count Nanno of
Verona, acting as imperial missus, tried the case of Ratherius, the saintly
and fractious Veronese Bishop, he appealed formally for their opinion to
the townsmen (urbani) gathered en masse before him. Their answer, if
expressed (so the bishop says) with “porcine clamour," was articulate
and resulted in Ratherius' deposition. In both these cases, however, the
breach between citizens and bishop remains personal, not constitutional,
in its nature, for neither at Verona nor at Milan did the prelate exercise
the powers of a count in his city. But a deliberate effort to replace the
bishop in some of his governmental rights appears at Cremona, where he
was endowed with comital authority over the city and a radius of five
miles round it. In 996 the Emperor Otto III granted to the free citizens,
“rich and poor," the absolute use of their common rights of pasture and
of the river-transit in the contado as well as the State rights annexed
thereto. The bishop, Ulric, when he heard of the grant, was up in arms,
for his were the profitable dues and tolls affected; and soon the unpre-
cedented diploma was quashed.
Thus we can sum up the results of the Ottonian peace on the cities.
More populous, more wealthy, more secure, their embryonic institutions
were allowing them to act collectively, however heterogeneous their
popu-
lation of nobles, great and small, and plebeians might be. As a rule,
doubtless, their bishop was still their protector, the nucleus round which
their rudimentary assemblies could cohere. At this very time, in the
transaction of the bishopric's secular affairs we find the bishop surrounded
by a council which included lay vassals of his and notables, and the steward
of his lands, the vicedominus, was in many cases becoming lay and heredi-
tary. But if such incidents as that of Cremona were exceptions which
chequered a usually good understanding, they nevertheless go to shew
the sense of an independent corporate existence among the citizens, that
they were not merely the prolongation of the bishop's shadow. Pisa,
early mature through her shipping, could wage a city-war with neigh-
bouring Lucca in 1004, and in the same year King Henry II was receiving
hostages and collective oaths of fealty from the Lombard towns! . Com-
munes and consuls there were none as yet, but notables and assemblies
could already act in concert, though all the powers of State-government,
strictly speaking, still belonged to imperial or feudal officials. The
slowness of the change may have been partly due to the fact that
some of these officials or vassals were the leading notables of the town.
In fact, the impulse to association and to the formation of local custom
was shewing itself even in the feudal countryside, especially in the little
towns (castelli) which grew out of the castles of refuge. These were co-
operative from the start, in spite of the extreme inequality in the rights
1 Adalbold, Vita Heinrici, 41, MGH, Script. iv, p. 693: “Civitates etiam, ad
quas rex nondum venerat, obsides ultro transmittunt fidemque debitam per sacra-
menta promittunt. "
1


## p. 215 (#261) ############################################

The castelli: the boni homines
215
and status of their denizens, ranging from few lords to many oppressed
serfs. The evidence for them, indeed, mostly dates from a later time, but
it still allows us to draw some conclusions as to their earlier existence,
and as to the economic necessities which compelled some collective action
within them. Like the tiny vicinanze they possessed common rights to
pastures and woods; there was watch to be kept on the walls, and neces-
sary repairs of their fabric; and a chief-watchman (portinarius) to be
appointed by common consent of the feudal lord and his subjects of all
degrees. In the rare cases when there was no lord or compossessing family
of signori, the denizens stepped into his place, as we can see in a unique
diploma of Otto II in 983 to the men of Lazise on Lake Garda. These
eighteen men, who seem to be merely the chief free men of the castello,
receive collectively the right to levy tolls and dues, as if they were feudal
magnates. They had outrun their city neighbours in this prophetic grant
because no feudal lord stood between them and the Emperor.
A variant of these primitive arrangements of the north Italian towns
may be seen in the contemporary institutions of Venice, where the con-
tinued connexion with the East Roman Empire led both to the earlier
foundation of a republican government and to its retention of a quasi-
monarchical administration. In Venice ultimate power resided in the
tumultuary mass-meeting of the citizens, the arengo, which elected the
Doge, and approved peace and war and the most important State decisions.
The Doge (Dux), as befitted the lineal successor of a Byzantine provincial
governor, with the aid of his nominees exercised the whole executive, but
around him in his solemn court for judgment and consultation gathered
the notables, clerical and lay, the maiores, mediocres, et minores citizens.
These boni homines, as they were often called, among whom naturally the
landowners (at Venice identical with the chief shippers) predominated,
formed a kind of representation of the community, and their presence
was practically necessary to an act of State.
In every circumscription in the Regnum Italicum, whether vicinantia,
plebs, or comitatus, the boni homines, or notables, appear. They were
assessors in the courts, witnesses of deeds, arbitrators in voluntary juris-
diction, advisers of the higher authorities, interpreters of local custom.
They were not a noble class, but in the city were normally free landholders,
preferably of some rank. Among them would be the iudices (the legal
experts, earlier called scabini), the holders of curtes (manors) within the
walls, and a selection of lesser nobles and freemen who had become well-
to-do in trade. It was the boni homines, a composite collection of notables
long-practised in local affairs, who were to be the animating nucleus of
the future commune.
The first movement towards city-autonomy, strictly speaking, seems
to have taken place in southern Italy. There, outside the limits of the
Regnum Italicum, among warring, fragmentary states and laxly-held
Byzantine territories, the notables, with the active or passive assent of
)
CH. V.


## p. 216 (#262) ############################################

216
Proto-communes in the south
the population, could form a more or less comprehensive league of towns-
men and extort, or take unheeded, from their sovereign part at least of
the functions of government. “Facta est communitas prima," we read in
the Annals of Benevento under 1015'. The pact of Sergius IV, Duke of
Naples, with his subjects c. 1030 recognises such a societas, though per-
haps of nobles only, and engages that peace or war shall not be declared,
nor customs changed, nor a noble tried, save with the consent of the
nobles. Still earlier, during the minority of their Duke Atenolf II, c. 1000,
the nobles and boni homines of Gaeta obtained a share in political power.
The participation of the wealthy shippers in the government of Amalfi
was at least as large. All these towns, however, were the capitals of
hereditary princes; and more real communal forms are to be dimly
discerned in the restless cities of Apulia under the weak Byzantine rule.
Thus at Bari the Fraternitas Sanctae Mariae, headed by the archbishop,
appears to have taken a leading part in the faction-fights, defence, and
effective government of the town. The city of Troia enjoyed practical
autonomy, at the price of a tribute, from its foundation by the catapan
Boioannes in 1018. Assembled in the bishop's court, the chief citizens
(seniores and boni homines) chose their judge and turmarch (commander-
in-chief) and directed affairs. In these Apulian proto-communes, the
scanty evidence gives the impression that they were more strictly oligarchic
in character than their congeners in the north. The bishop and the
nobiliores homines seem to act for their fellow-citizens with no appeal to
a city-assembly. It was a difference more in form than in substance,
which was due perhaps to Byzantine, anti-popular influences, and in any
case was obliterated by the appearance of an assembly when in the twelfth
century the Apulian cities take rank as full-fledged, but definitely subject,
universitates under the Norman dukes.
The fact, however, that the Apulian towns fell under Norman rule
before their institutions were fully developed, separates them sharply from
the city-states of North Italy, which in fact, if not in theory, were in
their maturity independent republics. In the eleventh century the northern
towns were only in process of attaining internal solidarity and self-
government. There it was only gradually, and so to say blindly, through
many tentative variations, that the sworn league (coniuratio), which
appears perhaps as early as the tenth century among sections of the
bourgeoisie, coalesces with the city-assembly in a commune. We may
assume, arguing from later custom, that it was probably the city-assembly,
the mass-meeting of inhabitants, which took the collective oath of fealty
to Henry II in 1004, and at Ivrea to Marquess Ulric-Manfred II of Turin
1 Annales Beneventani (S. Sophiae), BISI, 42, p. 131. The coniuratio secundo of
1041(2) (ibid. p. 135) gives a valuable light on the meaning of communitas and the
method of forming a commune.
2 For the term coniuratio for the league of the Milanese c. 980 against Arch-
bishop Landolf II is only used by the chronicler Arnulf (c. 1070).


## p. 217 (#263) ############################################

Classes in the northern cities
217
c. 1016 in terms which hint at the process by which the sworn association
long after became identical with the city-state? . But the special protection
which Henry II granted in 1014 to omnes maiores homines dwelling in
the castello (borough) of Savona, and to cunctos arimannos dwelling in
the city of Mantua, can only refer to definite classes of the population.
Leaving aside, however, such a special kind of landholder as the arimannus
of the eleventh century, we find the population of the north Italian cities
falling into three main divisions, the capitanei, the valvassores minores
or secundi milites, and the plebeians? , i. e. roughly speaking, the barons,
the knights and squires, and the non-nobles. The two first classes were
by no means composed solely of nobles who held manors or fiefs in the
city proper. A large number of the countryside nobles resided for a part
of the year within the walls. This was an immemorial custom in town-
loving Italy, and had been given a stronger hold by the barbarian ravages
of the tenth century. In consequence in the early class-warfare we cannot
precisely distinguish in their case between town and country, nor can we
indeed draw any hard and fast line of demarcation in later times. The
plebeians, however, when town-bred, are townsmen only. A further
characteristic of these nobles, and indeed of their times, is the rapid
multiplication when once devastation and anarchy had been removed by
the Ottonian peace. It was favoured by the room made by previous de-
population, and by the practice of compossession, or at the least of equal
subdivision of inheritances, which was all but universal in Italy. Thus
the families of capitanei already amounted to a respectable fighting force,
especially as they were at the head of numerous masnadieri (to use a later
term) or unfree retainers, while the lesser vavassors were naturally very
numerous. In the end, indeed, both classes in the countryside were
impoverished by their own numerousness. The twelfth-century cattani
(capitanei) of Tuscany were often little better than small country squires,
and there the term Lombardi occasionally comes to mean groups of freed
masnadieri as well as survivors of the older nobility.
The habit of sworn associations among classes of the population first
comes clearly to light in the war (1035-1037) between the capitanei of
the Milanese province, headed by Archbishop Aribert, and the lesser
vavassors, in which the vavassors, partly by the aid of the Emperor
Conrad II, finally gained the dayHenceforward the minor nobility
had the same security of tenure (i. e. practically the full property) of their
fiefs as their privileged suzerains. The opposition, however, remained
between the two orders, occasioned by difference of wealth and status,
1 “Communiter cives sibi iurare fecit. ” Bloch, Neu. Arch. xxii, 17. Cf. the
acceptance by the Lodese c. 1027 of a new bishop on the nomination of Archbishop
Aribert of Milan: “in commune deliberant suscipiendum episcopum. ” Arnulfus
Mediol. 11, 7.
2 Cf.
supra, Vol. 11, Chaps. VII, pp. 174–5, x, p. 221, xi, p. 265.
The term val-
vassor became appropriated to the valvassores minores in common usage.
3 See supra, Vol. 111, Chap. xi, pp. 265-7.
CH, V.


## p. 218 (#264) ############################################

218
The coniuratio of Milan (1037): the carroccio
1
1
1
and even of profession, as commerce increased and some minor nobles
became traders; and to it was added the enmity between both and the
third class, the plebeians, or to use the later vernacular name, the popolani,
whose leaders were naturally the merchants, negotiatores. The rise of the
plebeians was indeed intimately connected with the increase of population
and trade. Italy produced more; her consumption of necessaries, such
as salt and cloth, and of luxuries, e. g. silk and spices, was greater. From
her seaport towns, along the natural arteries of the Lombard rivers, over
the chief Alpine passes, the transport of foreign and native wares grew
in volume. Her manufactures, such as they were, began to flourish with
the enlarged home and foreign demand, trivial indeed if we compare
present-day statistics, but highly wealth-bringing then. There was already
noticeable a drift of peasants to the cities where such gains and compara-
tive freedom were to be had. We may almost say that these plebeians
were recruited for two centuries from the enterprising and adventurous.
The life of the Italian cities, and later of their communes, was almost
inextricably intertwined with their church and its head, the bishop.
Civic patriotism, religious emotion, and the ordinary transactions of life,
the market and the festival, all clustered round the city-saints and their
fanes, and it is barely possible to define the relative shares of the religious,
the political, or the economic motive. When Aribert was imprisoned by
the Emperor Conrad during the war of the vavassors, a mixture of civic,
religious, and even national enthusiasm swept over the Milanese. The
citizens, with the exception we may assume of the vavassors then with-
drawn to the countryside, rushed to arms, were enraptured at their arch-
bishop's escape, and successfully withstood an imperial siege! Whether
the league? on this occasion strictly included more than capitanei may
be doubted, but the practical co-operation of the plebeians is none the
less clear. It only required the peace between capitanei and vavassors for
them to form a party of their own. Already Aribert had invented the
standard of the future commune, which became the emblem of civic liberty
all over North Italy. Round the carroccio, the ox-drawn waggon with
its pole and flag, the citizens henceforth rallied in battle.
Aribert had not long been reconciled with the Emperor Henry III,
when the new development took place at Milan. Whatever grudges
existed between capitanei and vavassors, they united in insolence to the
plebeians. The ancient authority of the Marquess-Count of Milan, an
Otbertine, had decayed, the Archbishop was himself the greatest of the
capitanei by blood, and the oppression of many noble tyrants became
intolerable. In 1042 the explosion came when a plebeian was slain by a
knight in a private quarrel. The ever-enduring feuds among the nobles
were to be a continual advantage to the popolani, and now the people
1 See supra, Vol. 111, Chap. xi, pp. 266-7.
2 Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi, xxxv, "tumultus. . . populi Mediolanensis quaerentis ab
imperatore si vellet favere coniurationi eorum. "


## p. 219 (#265) ############################################

Lanzo and Erlembald of Milan
219
found a leader in the capitaneus and jurist Lanzo, notary and iudex Sacri
Palatii. With slaughter and rapine the whole body of nobles was driven
out; Aribert himself, no longer a popular idol, decamped; and a new siege
was endured for three years with fierce heroism until weariness, the
threatened intervention of Henry III, and the statesmanship of Lanzo
led to an accommodation in 1044. The nobles returned under terms of
mutual oblivion of the past, but “the state of the city and its Church
had been changed. "1 Henceforward the plebeians form a separate power,
and the curious tripartite constitution of the later Milanese commune
had begun. Henry III, perhaps, thought to take a middle course when
he appointed a vavassor, Guido, to succeed Aribert as archbishop, but
neither the fissure between classes was to be healed, nor the instinct for
self-government to be conjured, by the fact that the archbishop was not
formidable either by birth or character.
None the less, we still find the archbishop taking the lead in the next
corporate act of his city, the war of Milan with Pavia in 1059; it needed
the convulsion of the religious struggle lasting over twenty years from
1056 to shatter finally the archiepiscopal authority, as that of the
marquess, last effectively exercised shortly after Guido's accession, had
long been made obsolete. The strife, however, not only ousted the arch-
bishop from power; it enabled a real commune to be formed by merging
class-distinctions in religious factions. If the conservatives, who upheld
the autonomy and ancient usages of the see of St Ambrose, included
most of the nobles, and the reformers had a majority among the plebeians,
especially among the poorest class, from which their derisive name of
Patarines,“ rag-pickers," was derived, yet the reforming leaders who led
the agitation for clerical celibacy and the abolition of simony belonged
to noble houses, and had many associates of their own rankThe greatest
of them, the capitaneus Erlembald, taught autonomy to his fellow-citizens.
The lean, red-bearded man, with his flashing eyes, could carry with him
any assembly, great or small, and dominated the people by his oratory.
A council (or was it an executive committee? ) of thirty surrounded him,
but in these times of revolution the arengo played a part it never did in
the settied constitution. When that was really established in Milan we
do not know, but in 1097 we find the first mention of the consuls of the
citys; and the existence of consuls implies that of the commune of which
they were the elected rulers.
Every commune had its peculiar features, due to its local charac-
teristics and local history, and Milan was especially marked by the share
the nobles of the countryside took in the commune from the start, and
1 Arnulfus Mediol. 11, 18, “adeo execrandum. . . ut. . . immutatus sit status urbis
et ecclesiae. ” That nobles and plebeians each formed sworn leagues is implied by
"partium fiunt iuramenta quam plurima. ”
2 See supra, Chap. 1, p. 40.
3 “Actum in ciuitate Mediolani in consulatu ciuium" in a Cremonese document
(P. Del Giudice, Di un recente opuscolo ecc. See Bibliography 111). Çf. Gli Atti del
comune di Milano, Introd. pp. xxviii-xxxi.
CH. V.


## p. 220 (#266) ############################################

220
Foundation of the communes
by the strict division of orders in the state. An unusual number of
nobles from at least three surrounding counties dwelt partially in the
greatest city of the plain; the plebeians rose early to wealth ; and the
rapid succession of class and religious wars crystallised distinctions of
rank at an early date into their final forms. Thus the consuls were care-
fully divided among the classes; in 1130 seven were capitanei, seven were
vavassors, and six plain citizens. It is another aspect of the same circum-
stances that Milan had little trouble with her dependent contadi, where
the feudal lords were her own chief citizens. Her early wars were only
with weaker cities such as Lodi and Como, or with rivals like the ancient
capital Pavia.
Most northern cities, either by their institutions or by their recorded
history, give evidence of class-warfare' as one cause of the emergence of
the commune, although this was by no means universal. The civil dis-
cord, which seems almost invariable, might be due to the dissensions of
the nobles among themselves, each faction with their abettors among the
plebeians. While at Lucca the people, aided here by the clergy and some
nobles, rose against their reforming bishop Anselm and Countess Matilda
and established consuls c. 1080, at Pisa we find the popular Archbishop
Daimbert, with five colleagues, publishing c. 1090 an award limiting the
height of the towers from which the nobles warred on one another. As
we might expect in this undeveloped time, the commune colloquium,
i. e. the arengo, is the chief constitutional instrument? , but something
like a council is indicated, and c. 1084 Pisa already had consuls. The
commune may have been established by the earlier securitas or award
of Bishop Gerard (1080–1085).
All over North Italy, however, at the commencement of the twelfth
century, consuls, the indubitable evidence of the full-fledged commune
emerging from the semi-autonomy of the eleventh century, were appearing,
here earlier, there later, according to the events of local history or the
chances of the preservation of the evidence to our days. Thus in
Lombardy, consuls are mentioned at Asti in 1093, at Pavia in 1105, at
Brescia in 1127, at Bologna in 1123; the first known consuls of Genoa
date from 1099; in Tuscany, Siena has consuls in 1125 and Florence in
1138, while in the documents of Arezzo they first appear in 1098. It
has become increasingly plain of late years' how they arose. During the
1 At Piacenza in 1090 (? 1091) circumstances were much like those in Milan in
1042: a miles fights a pedes. See Codagnelli, Ann. Placentini (SGUS), p. 1. The
milites abandoned the city, re-entered it during the absence of the army of the
pedites, and finally a concordia et pax was agreed to.
2 In 1081 the Emperor Henry IV promises to appoint no fresh Marquess of
Tuscany without the assent of twelve Pisans to be elected in the commune colloquium.
3 This view was put forward by R. Davidsohn, Entstehung des Consulats, in
Deutsch. Zeitschrift f. Geschichtswissenschaft, vi, p. 22, 1891, and still earlier by
Studi bergomensi, 1888, whose works did not attract attention for some
A.


## p. 221 (#267) ############################################

The oaths in the arengo
221
growth of civic freedom in the eleventh century, the city-notables, the
boni homines, like the more numerous notables of the several subordinate
viciniae among whom they were also counted, played an increasingly
important part. It was the boni homines—mostly greater or lesser nobles,
with jurists and a sprinkling of wealthy traders—who advised the bishop
in his curia, the count or marquess in his placitum, and took the lead in
the commune colloquium, the parlamento or arengo, of the whole city. As
the need for a more definite city-executive grew, a commission of boni
homines would be appointed, often ad hoc for some special business', but
soon permanently with the name of consuls. For instance twelve boni
homines represent Siena in business at Rome in 1124, but next year
consuls are in office. Occasionally we find the documents allow for the
possibility that not consuls but boni homines may be in power in some
future year? , there being yet no absolute permanency of the office. In
Genoa, till late in the twelfth century, the compagna of the citizens,
which established consuls and a common government, was renewable every
few years.
This very conservative habit of Genoa emphasises another aspect in
the rise of the commune. It was intended to include the whole city; it
was established by the commune colloquium; but it was in origin a private
sworn association for the maintenance of peace and the common advantage
of those who swore to it. It started from the coniurationes we have
marked among classes or persons. When the arengo was called upon to
swear collectively to such a league, we may say it became a commune“.
We still find in 1162 at Pisa, in 1143 at Genoa, a kind of boycott and
denial of aid and justice contemplated for such notables as refused to
join the league". With the establishment of consuls two oaths were
taken in the arengo, the one by each consul binding him to certain duties
for his term of office, the other by a representative in the name of the
assembled people, which must have included from the first a promise to
1 See the instance of Pisa, supra, p. 220, n. 2.
2 E. g. at Lucca in 1147, and at Colle and S. Gimignano in 1199; see Davidsohn,
Origine del Consolato, ASI, Ser. v, Vol. ix (1892), pp. 240-1.
3 Cafarus, Annales Ianuenses, ad annos. Cf. the Statuta Consulatus in MHP, 11,
Leges munic. I, c. 241 sqq. , and the Breve compagne, MHP, xviii, Leges Genuen.
c. 5 sqq. : “iuro compagnam usque ad annos quatuor. ”
4 More stress is here laid on the importance of the collective oath of the arengo
as establishing the commune than is usual. Cf. supra, p. 216, n. 1.
6 For Genoa see the Statuta Consulatus Ianuensis of 1143, MHP, 11, Leges munic.
1, c. 243: “Si quis lanuensis ab aliquo ex nobis specialiter et nominatim vocatus vel
a pluribus publice vocatus. . . fuerit intrare in nostram compangnam, et infra xl dies
nou introierit, non illi debiti erimus et personam eius et lamentationes eius per hos
iii annos non recipiemus. . . neque aliquod officium de communi illi dabimus. . . et
laudabimus populo ut personam eius. . . et pecuniam suam per mare non portet. '
For Pisa see the Breve consulum of 1162, Bonaini, Statuti inediti di Pisa, 1, 9:
“Eorum autem reclamationes qui sacramentum consulatui non fecerint inquisiti,
nisi a. . . consulibus remissum fuerit, mea sint voluntate. ”
CH. v.


## p. 222 (#268) ############################################

222
Cultural and political influences
.
obey the consuls'. These oaths which gave definite authority to an elected
magistracy could scarcely have been exchanged until such a magistracy
was established in the consulate, with which therefore we may date the
beginning of the commune proper? .
There has been debate on the origin of the new title. It was known,
we saw, in North Italy at Ravenna and Rome as a title of dignity, and
in eleventh-century Rome the consules Romanorum exercise functions in
the city government. These, and the style consul et dux borne by the
rulers of Naples and Gaeta, may have suggested or kept alive the title,
but it was probably a conscious return to Roman tradition, kept up in
so many cities by the schools of grammar, which led men to choose with
striking unanimity the classic term for a collegiate republican magistracy.
The influence of education is, indeed, not to be disregarded in the forma-
tion of Italian communes. Proud of their civic traditions and their
Roman past, the city-nobles received a more learned education than the
illiterate Transalpines. Besides schools of grammar there existed schools
of law, where nobles obtained the legal knowledge necessary for the
function of iudices, or jurists, and notaries, to which many of them were
addicted almost by hereditary succession. The Pavese jurist, Archbishop
Lanfranc of Canterbury, was no exceptional portent, and the increased
study of Justinian's Code towards the close of the eleventh century
synchronises with the emergence of the commune. Thus the adoption of
the term consuls for the chief magistracy is more than a choice of words;
it symbolises the classic learning, the legal training, the heritage from
the ancient world, which made the city-state, so to say, natural in Italy.
If religious, economic, and cultural phenomena all played parts in the
birth of the commune, the purely political circumstances of the Holy
Roman Empire also had most important effects. The Saxon and Salian
Emperors inherited a monarchy already debilitated, and were of necessity
absentees. Although Otto the Great might shrewdly balance bishop
against marquess, yet in the end his successors could never favour any
local magnate in the subject Regnum Italicum without reserve. An arch-
bishop of Milan might be as dangerous to his distant foreign suzerain as
I a marquess of Tuscany. A feudal monarch was not unnaturally but half
a friend to his great vassals. Like Conrad II he might deliberately
weaken them at a critical time, and, unlike more lasting kingdoms, in
Italy the monarch was seldom present to take their place in government.
Hence throughout the eleventh century it is not only the functions of
the king that are exercised at spasmodic intervals and wither, but those
1 The sacramentum consulatui, which became later the sacramentum sequimenti
potestatis. The words at Genoa in 1157 were (MHP, xviii, Leges Genuen. c. 5):
“quodcumque ipsi electi consules laudaverint aut statuerint secundum quod in
eorum brevibus determinatum est. . . observabo et operabor. ”
? Evidence for the contemporaneous institution of consuls and compagna may be
seen in the townships subject to Genoa, e. g. "faciemus compagnam et consulatum
in plebeio Lavanie” (1157). Caro, Die Verfassung Genuas, p. 73, n. 123.


## p. 223 (#269) ############################################

Supersession of feudal and state authorities
223
of the great vassals too, episcopal or lay. The citizens, favoured like the
Savonese by Henry II or the Lucchese and Pisans by Henry IV, were quick
to take advantage of the weakness of their rulers, whether it was due to
revolts, invasions, religious wars, feuds, or the mere break-up of the great
fiefs by the practice of compossession, which subdivided for instance the
great Otbertine house into five or six numerous branches. In Tuscany,
which retained primogeniture, the power of the marquess, although even
there endangered, outlasted in the person of Countess Matilda that of
all its unwiser compossessing competitors. And the strength and the
practical efficiency of the citizens were mounting steadily as those of the
official holders of the public power declined. The functions, legal and
executive, of these became formal, and the groups of citizens, themselves
largely composed of secondary nobles, could by co-operative action and
voluntary jurisdiction leave little room for the count, and in the end
usurped the undoubted powers of the State. The same decadence of the
official government had aided in the establishment of proto-communes in
Byzantine Apulia.