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.
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.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
, 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. It was not unanalogous to the genesis of feudalism it-
self, and an age of feudal lords, of private wars, and of local custom, saw
little strange in cities making wars and internal leagues save their odd
capacity of acting in concert and enforcing their common regulations.
The usurpation of public functions and attributes by the communes
was also rendered easier by the status of some of their members. The
branches of the vicecomital house remained the leading members of the
compagna of Genoa; the Viscounts (Visconti) of Pisa and Milan, and the
Vicedomini (Visdomini) of Florence, were chief clans in their respective
communes. Above all the bishops, who even when they had been elbowed
out of their comital rights were usually reconciled to the new state of
affairs in the first half of the twelfth century, were invaluable allies to
their fellow-citizens. They at least held a position of unqnestioned legality
in the feudal chain; they could, even when not invested with comital
powers, yet at least for their episcopal fiefs (episcopium) receive homage
and conclude recognised feudal contracts. Thus the Archbishop of Pisa
and the Bishop of Siena are all-important for the enlargement and
formation of their communes' dominion over the contadi (counties) sur-
rounding them. The lords of the countryside, new allies or vanquished
enemies, surrendered their lands to the bishop and his city or to the
bishop alone, and, by contracts which no feudal lawyer could impugn,
became subjects to a private power as yet non-existent or incapable
of such action in the eyes of feudal jurisprudence.
The enlargement of the rule of the city-commune over the county
(contado) and diocese of which it was the centre was the most natural of
developments, an aggression which was barely distinguishable from defence.
From the beginning, the city-notables headed by the bishop, and the city
itself, had lands in the contado; and these links were rendered more
numerous by a process in the countryside too which was in full activity
CH. V.
## p. 224 (#270) ############################################
224
Conquest of the contado
early in the twelfth century. With their multiplication, the nobility did
not grow less oppressive to their serfs; in fact, poorer by reason of their
numbers, they were the more inclined to heap abuse on abuse (new ex-
action, uncustomary, ab usu)' on their serfs. But these, too, were more
numerous and restive, more inclined and able to resist, if their lords were
not too great dignitaries. Hence, there is a double stream of immigration
to the cities : one of lesser nobles, seeking a new way of livelihood, such
as the historic Buondelmonti who thus joined the original city-nobility,
the Uberti and others, at Florence; the other of peasants, contadini,
lured by the comparative freedom of the town. For some cities this
voluntary adhesion of the countryside nobles continued to be the chief
means of gaining control of the contado. The greatest lords round
Pisa, the Gherardesca and the Upezzinghi, along with a crowd of lesser
feudatories, were glad to be enrolled, whether as vassals of the arch-
bishop or without an intermediary, as Pisan citizens.
But there were motives which urged the communes to forcible ex-
pansion as well. There was the city food-supply to be assured; there
was the security of the citizens, new and old, and their lands outside the
walls; there were inherited feuds and claims, ecclesiastical and secular;
there were the freedom and safety of roads, the abolition of tolls and
blackmail, and the exit and entrance of the commerce, which took an
ever larger share in the city's thoughts; there was the independence of
the city itself to be preserved from ancient or invented feudal claims. If
lesser nobles could be both troublesome neighbours and a tempting prey,
it was the surviving greater houses, strong in fiefs and vassals, who were
most dangerous. For many years Florence waged war with her neigh-
bours, the Counts Guidi, heirs in some degree of Matilda, and the
Alberti of Prato, thus gaining by slow progresses, and the capture of
castle after castle, the control of her immediate surroundings. Siena
slowly mastered the powerful counts around her in the same twelfth
century. One usual condition of peace enforced by the victorious commune
was the compulsory citizenship and partial residence within the walls, say
for three months a year, of her vanquished enemies. This was only doing
by compulsion what so many nobles had done and were doing of their
free will, but while it gave the commune a stronger hold on the country-
side, it also, as we shall see, intensified the native disorder prevalent
among the half-feudal clans of the city.
Thus, as the twelfth century wore on, the great communes were
securing control of the greater part of their diocese or contado. It was
the commune which superintended in the last resort justice and peace,
and levied its vassals for war. There did not thence follow any difference
in the status of the serf, who remained subject to his immediate lord, or
the city which succeeded him. Nevertheless, a very considerable change
1 An ab-usus was a regular new exaction, a supra-usus, a capricious one.
1
## p. 225 (#271) ############################################
The rural communes
225
was taking place over tracts of the countryside in North Italy. The in-
habitants of the castelli or fortified townships, and even of lesser places,
were forming communes of their own, arising out of the necessary co-
operation between compossessing lords and vicini. As early
As early as 1093 the
Counts of Biandrate in Lombardy shared the jurisdiction over their town
of Biandrate with twelve consuls of the habitatores, appointed seemingly
from the ranks of the rustici, the peasants. They made a separate grant
to vassal nobles, milites, but these submitted to the consuls' jurisdiction.
All through the twelfth century we find petty communes arising and de-
veloping in Tuscany. They might begin from groups of lesser vassals or
freeholders or of freed masnadieri, organised in a community known as
Lombards—in this fashion we find the commune of the men of San Ger-
vasio in Val d'Era assenting to the sale of their castello and curtis by the
count whose fief it was to the Bishop of Lucca. They might be similar
associations of the villani or serfs of a vicinia or of a whole pieve. The two
communities often subsisted together in the same district, but they end
in being united as a communis et populus. With an infinite variety of
constituents and history, they were approaching throughout the twelfth
century a common type, the rural commune of landholders of different
status, governed by its elected consuls. It was rather local administration,
land-rights, and cultivation, than politics proper which formed the subject
of these township-communities. What was in process was the decease of
feudalism as an economic and administrative system, and its replacement
by co-operative arrangements which drew their origin eventually from
immemorial methods of using and sharing the land, all quickened to new
growth by a new prosperity.
To sum up this aspect of the theme: towards the close of the twelfth
century North Italy was subdivided into a considerable number of city-
states, the great communes, for the most part, though not all, ancient
episcopal sees. They were rapidly growing in wealth and population,
how rapidly may be gathered from the new and wider circuits of walls
they were constrained to build. Pisa already had her new walls by 1081,
Piacenza before 1158; Florence was building her Second Circle in
1172-4, Modena in 1188, and Padua in 1195; and the fact implies the
existence of important suburbs outside the old walls for some time pre-
viously. These vigorous towns were in perpetual strife with one another
and with the surviving great feudal lords, who like the Pelavicini, the
Estensi, the Marquesses of Montferrat in Lombardy, the Malaspina in
Lunigiana, or the Aldobrandeschi in Tuscany, held out amid the
mountains and the marshes. With these exceptions, they were ruling in
various ways and degrees their contado, the county and diocese sur-
rounding them, ruling from one point of view over a strange medley of
feudal vassals, freemen, and serfs of all degrees, from another over an
assemblage of petty communities, all illustrations of that method of self-
management by association and league, which was necessary for safety,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. V.
15
## p. 226 (#272) ############################################
226
Inter-city wars. Development of commerce
which was dictated by tradition and material circumstances, and which
was provoked by the decadence and abuses of outworn feudalism.
The energies of the communes were far from being wholly absorbed
in self-government, in internal production, and in the annexation of their
contadi. The inter-city wars went on with unceasing fury from year to
year, it might be said from century to century. Not till Siena was an-
nexed by Cosimo of Florence in 1557, was their series over. In some
degree these conflicts had their rise in sheer antipathy and jealousy. The
strongly-marked character of each commune, its intense local patriotisin,
made its neighbours its enemies. Old disputes over diocesan boundaries,
as between Pisa and Lucca, Siena and Arezzo, or over feudal claims of
superiority, as between Milan and Lodi, furnished grounds for dispute
where sentiment had free play. The moral shortcomings of each Italian
town are enshrined in civic proverbs and in Dante. But far more im-
portant were the causes of strife which arose from the mutual relations
of towns depending on commerce for their prosperity and independence.
Geography and trade in combination were the most explosive compound
of nature and art. Seaports were rivals in a narrow but profitable
market, when piracy and trading went hand in hand. By land there was
the outlet to the sea, or a toll-free road by land, as well as rivalry in
manufacture, to create discord. Commercial competition for the pro-
tection of home-industry or the possession of the carrying-trade was the
staple of these city-wars.
Effective though the Crusades were in making the Italian seaports
European powers, in increasing their wealth and the scope of their enter-
prise, and in enlarging the mental horizon of all Europe, they did not
begin the career of the maritime republics. The trade of these was of
natural growth, and it was rather in the pre-crusading wars with the
western Saracens, in the abolition of Muslim piracy, and in the opening
of sea-routes to the Ponent (the West) and the Levant (the East), that
they secured their pre-eminence. Venice, by taming the Slav pirates of
Dalmatia and defeating the Sicilian Muslims at Bari in 1002, was in a
way to become queen of the Adriatic. Pisa, sacked by Saracens in 1004
and 1011, could yet defeat them near Reggio in 1005 and, in concert
with Genoa, rescue Sardinia from Mujāhid of Denia in 1016. This
victory began the long wars of Pisa and Genoa, fought for the trade of
the Mediterranean and more especially for the exploitation of Sardinia
and Corsica. They were still allies against their common enemy, the
Saracens, but their joint capture (1087) of Mahdiyah in Barbary from
Tamim the Zairid, and the famous temporary conquest (1113-15) of the
Balearic Isles by the Pisans and Christian allies from the neighbouring
coasts (with the exception of Genoa), together with the Norman conquest
of Sicily (1061-1091), established Christian supremacy in the Ponent.
Thereafter, Pisans and Genoese fought one another with little relaxation
in East and West. Amalfi, once first in the Levantine trade, faded under
## p. 227 (#273) ############################################
The Tuscan communes
227
its Norman masters, and its sack in 1135 by the Pisans, in the service of
Pope and Emperor, hastened its decline. But the bull (1133) of
Innocent II which assigned Sardinia and half Corsica to the Pisan sphere
of ecclesiastical influence, and the rest of Corsica to the new Genoese
archbishopric, only resulted in a truce. The two cities fought for influence
in Sardinia, for trade with Sicily and the Ponent, and in the East there
was a three-cornered struggle between them and Venice. The strife of
Pope and Emperor, the Crusades, were incidents in and opportunities for
this civic rivalry. If Pisa at first took the lead and was predominant in
Sardinia at the close of the twelfth century, she was, nevertheless, fatally
hampered by her open contado and strong Tuscan neighbours. Genoa,
once she had subdued her Riviera, was secured by the Apennines from
inland rivalry; and during the thirteenth century Pisa slowly lost ground.
The geography of Tuscany was largely responsible for the inland
rivalries of the province. Across the encircling Apennines came all-
important roads from the north. By the Monte Bardone (now the
Pontremoli) Pass came the Via Francigena from Parma (joined by the
land-route from Genoa) to Lucca. Then it crossed the River Arno near
Fucecchio and struck south to Siena and Rome. From Bologna, the chief
junction-city on the Emilian Way, came two roads, one through Pistoia,
the other straight across the Apennines to Florence. From Florence
again two roads led to Rome, one westerly to Poggibonsi, where it joined
the Via Francigena and also a direct route from Pisa, through Volterra,
to Siena, and the other, the ancient Via Cassia, easterly, past Arezzo,
down the valley of the Chiana, under Montepulciano, to Orvieto and
Rome. From Florence, too, flowed the natural artery to the sea, the
River Arno, with its port at Pisa. To these trade-route factors should be
added finally the lure of fertile stretches of countryside for food, for
produce, and for men. Each commune was anxious for trade-outlets
under its own control, the power of controlling the outlets of its neigh-
bours, and for a wide subject-territory. Nowhere was the theory of
territorial corridors better understood than in medieval Tuscany.
As a result Pisa and Lucca were early mortal enemies. There were
disputed tracts of fertile contado. Lucca held both the northern outlet
of the Via Francigena and its crossing at the Arno. Pisa held its gate,
and that of most Tuscany, to the sea. Pisa fought to gain a footing on
the Via Francigena before it reached Lucca, to control the mouth of the
Lucchese river, the Serchio, and to remove Lucca's grip on the middle
Arno at Fucecchio. The Lucchese sought to compel all trade from the
north to halt in their city and pay dues there, and to prevent a Pisan
wedge intervening between them and Siena. Already in 1003 the two
cities, not yet communes, were fighting. Early in the twelfth century,
the struggle took a more permanent form, and the Lucchese became the
born allies of the Genoese in their war with Pisa.
While her manufactures, chiefly of cloth, were of small account,
CH. V.
15-2
## p. 228 (#274) ############################################
228
Florence. Umbria
Florence was seldom Pisa's enemy. They were not next-door neighbours
and Lucca's hold on the Arno was vexatious to both. As late as 1171
they allied against Genoa and Lucca, at the price of free trade and equal
opportunity for the Florentines in Pisa. But the terms were burdensome
to Pisa, and the Florentine advance southward was causing an opposition
of interests. Florence was endowed with a large contado and was anxious
to extend it, but was also anxious to free her roads to Rome and the
west. Thus she was hostile to Arezzo, a backward feudal hill-town, and
still more to Siena. Florence wished for the Val Chiana and its road,
and for Monte Pulciano, which would give her free exit to Orvieto and
Rome. She was also eager to wrest the cross-roads at Poggibonsi from
Siena, so as to have a footing on the Via Francigena and the road to
Pisa. The wars caused by this enmity, pursued through the twelfth
century, led to Florence ousting the Sienese from Poggibonsi in 1208 and
repelling them from Monte Pulciano. With these minor communes in
the Florentine sphere of influence, with the Florentine acquisition of
Empoli on the lower Arno in 1182, with the rapid increase of Florence's
manufacture, wealth, and power, the Pisans could no longer favour their
new rival's prosperity. The Italian communes, no more than ancient
Greek cities, were able to live and let live; their passionate patriotism
was wholly local; their institutions, sprung from small local units and
dictated by local needs, were by nature incapable of territorial ex-
tension; their interests were sharply antagonistic. No city could share
its freedom with another; rather, full freedom and independence were
only obtainable by the depression or even subjection of rivals. Thus we
find Pisa, which had of late immensely profited by its services to the
Empire, holding aloof in 1197, together with threatened Pistoia, from
the Tuscan League of San Genesio, which was led by Florence and pro-
moted by the Papacy so as to reduce the imperial interference, lately
made so real by Henry VI, in the province. Rupture and war with
Florence did not come till 1218, but it thenceforward continued with
intervals till the fall of Pisa in 1405. In the thirteenth century, the foes
of Florence are the Ghibelline Pisa, Siena, Pistoia, and Arezzo, Ahose
neighbouring communes in fact whose submission was requisite and
whose rivalry was to be dreaded for the free development of her com-
merce. Lucca was a faithful friend, but to Pisa's enemy.
The circumstances of the central band of Italy, of the Roman Cam-
pagna, the Duchy of Spoleto, and the March of Ancona, seem altogether
more primitive than those of the great commercial cities of the north.
Besides the Tuscan roads to Rome, the chief commercial and military
routes were the coast-road (Via Apruntina) past Ancona to the south,
and that roughly in the line of the ancient Flaminian Way which crossed
the Apennines from Fano and led by two main tracks past a string of
cities, like Perugia, to Rome. But these small towns fought rather for
land than for commercial supremacy. They were cramped for room in
1
## p. 229 (#275) ############################################
Lombardy
229
their narrow Umbrian valleys. Yet even in Umbria there appears a
tendency for the cities in connexion with the western route to group
round its central town, Perugia, in hostility to the cities on the old
Roman Way, with their leader, Spoleto.
It was partly disputes over their respective boundaries, partly the
desire for free, or rather preferential, outlets for their trade, which made
the communes so frequently enemies of their immediate neighbours and
allies of the city from which they were divided by those neighbours; and
these tendencies were increased by the fact that while a petty commune
not unusually accepted cheerfully a great city's overlordship and pro-
tection, those of middle size fought desperately for their full autonomy
and all autonomy could give. These characteristics are marked when we
turn to the geography and politics of Lombardy and the Romagna.
The whole of Lombardy between the Alps and the Apennines was
linked together by its natural artery, the River Po and its tributaries,
with the assistance of a few subsidiary streams, like the Adige, to the
east. Along these waterways the commerce of the land had arisen; they
remained the cheapest form of transit. The commercial outlets to the
north were by a series of Alpine passes: the Mont Cenis and Mont Genèvre,
debouching into the plain at Susa in the territory of the Count of Savoy;
the Great St Bernard coming from Savoyard Aosta to Ivrea; the Splugen,
the Septimer, and the Stelvio entering Italy at Como; the Brenner,
whence routes ran to Verona and Brescia; and the less known Strada
d'Alemagna reaching to Vicenza and Padua. To the south the chief outlets
were the ports of Venice and Genoa. At Venice was the meeting-place of
the trade from the Po and the Brenner and that from the Levant. At
Genoa the sea-trade similarly met that from the western Alpine passes,
focussed on the way at Asti and Vercelli. But there were also the land-exits
to the south. From Piacenza on the Po the Emilian Way went through
a series of wealthy cities till it reached Rimini on the Adriatic. Leading
from it there were the Via Francigena, branching off at Parma, the roads
to Florence, branching off at Bologna, and the Flaminian Way from
Rimini to Rome. Favourable positions on all these routes brought
wealth and greatness. It was the aim of every city to control as long
stretches of them as possible, and if possible to control exits over the
mountains and by the sea.
To the west Genoa was fortunate in an early domination of her
narrow Riviera and in the formidable barrier of the Apennines in her
rear. Her cue was merely to be sure that trade flowed steadily from the
inland emporiums which needed her more than she needed them. Asti
was mainly preoccupied in securing free transit from the passes ; her chief
enemies were the feudal marquesses (the Aleramids of Montferrat,
Saluzzo, etc. ) who survived in backward Piedmont; it became her ambition
to dominate the little communes which sprang up in the twelfth century
on the routes to the Western Alps, as it had previously been to enlarge
CH. V.
## p. 230 (#276) ############################################
230
Milan. Emilia. The Trevisan March
her direct contado. Milan, in the centre, was a more potent focus of dis-
turbance. An ancient capital, populous and powerful as the centre of a
wide champaign, a seat of manufacture at the meeting-place of almost
every route, she had every temptation for aggression. First, she is seen
gaining outlets ; she conquers and reconquers in 1118 and 1127 Como,
which blocked the way to the Alps', and Lodi (1027, 1107-11), which
lay between her and the Po. Almost at the same time began her enmity,
soon to become traditional, with the other capital, Pavia, and Cremona,
rival centres these of the transit commerce, and keys of the Po, no mere
entrances to it. Milan's natural allies were Crema and Tortona,
threatened respectively by Cremona and Pavia with the same fate which
Lodi and Como had undergone from Milan. By the usual chequer-pattern
of these feuds, Brescia and Piacenza were inclined to Milan, Bergamo and
Novara to Pavia. The oft-repeated wars were still being waged when
Barbarossa entered Italy and by his claims and actions gave rise to the
Lombard League.
Along the Emilian Way, for the same reasons, each city was the
enemy of its immediate neighbours. Piacenza and Reggio were at odds
with Parma, Cremona, and Modena. Through Piacenza and Cremona
this southern system was related to the central wars and alliances; through
Modena with feuds farther east. For Modena stood in dread of and
enmity with Bologna. Docta Bolonia, the centre of legal studies, was
great not only through her university but through her cross-roads. She
was eager to increase her contado, and eventually to dominate the minor
Romagnol cities to the coast, an aim which for a while she achieved in
her best days in the thirteenth century. This, however, was not yet.
She had not even entered on the wars connected with Venetian ambitions,
which gave some consistency to the politics of the Trevisan, or Veronese,
March. Venice aimed at controlling all exits to the sea from Ravenna
northwards at least, if not from Ancona. Against her, but severed by
their own disputes, stood Padua, Treviso, Ferrara, and Ravenna. But
Padua and Treviso were likewise on uneasy terms with their northern
neighbours and outlets, Verona and Vicenza, as well as at some variance
with the branch of the Otbertine marquesses who, being eliminated from
Milan, had their chief possessions round the small town of Este, and
thence were soon to take their title and surname. Mantua, impregnable
amid her marshes, was on her side at war with Verona over the important
limits of their respective contadi. To sum up, when the Hohenstaufen came,
there were systems of alliance and enmity ready-made, to be decorated
and in some degree inspired by the contest of Papacy and Empire. It
was in spite of these ingrained feuds, and as a testimony to the desire for
1 Most Lombard towns seem to have aided Milan in this long war, a fact which
shews how important the three northern passes were to them.
2 1110 for Cremona, c.
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. It was not unanalogous to the genesis of feudalism it-
self, and an age of feudal lords, of private wars, and of local custom, saw
little strange in cities making wars and internal leagues save their odd
capacity of acting in concert and enforcing their common regulations.
The usurpation of public functions and attributes by the communes
was also rendered easier by the status of some of their members. The
branches of the vicecomital house remained the leading members of the
compagna of Genoa; the Viscounts (Visconti) of Pisa and Milan, and the
Vicedomini (Visdomini) of Florence, were chief clans in their respective
communes. Above all the bishops, who even when they had been elbowed
out of their comital rights were usually reconciled to the new state of
affairs in the first half of the twelfth century, were invaluable allies to
their fellow-citizens. They at least held a position of unqnestioned legality
in the feudal chain; they could, even when not invested with comital
powers, yet at least for their episcopal fiefs (episcopium) receive homage
and conclude recognised feudal contracts. Thus the Archbishop of Pisa
and the Bishop of Siena are all-important for the enlargement and
formation of their communes' dominion over the contadi (counties) sur-
rounding them. The lords of the countryside, new allies or vanquished
enemies, surrendered their lands to the bishop and his city or to the
bishop alone, and, by contracts which no feudal lawyer could impugn,
became subjects to a private power as yet non-existent or incapable
of such action in the eyes of feudal jurisprudence.
The enlargement of the rule of the city-commune over the county
(contado) and diocese of which it was the centre was the most natural of
developments, an aggression which was barely distinguishable from defence.
From the beginning, the city-notables headed by the bishop, and the city
itself, had lands in the contado; and these links were rendered more
numerous by a process in the countryside too which was in full activity
CH. V.
## p. 224 (#270) ############################################
224
Conquest of the contado
early in the twelfth century. With their multiplication, the nobility did
not grow less oppressive to their serfs; in fact, poorer by reason of their
numbers, they were the more inclined to heap abuse on abuse (new ex-
action, uncustomary, ab usu)' on their serfs. But these, too, were more
numerous and restive, more inclined and able to resist, if their lords were
not too great dignitaries. Hence, there is a double stream of immigration
to the cities : one of lesser nobles, seeking a new way of livelihood, such
as the historic Buondelmonti who thus joined the original city-nobility,
the Uberti and others, at Florence; the other of peasants, contadini,
lured by the comparative freedom of the town. For some cities this
voluntary adhesion of the countryside nobles continued to be the chief
means of gaining control of the contado. The greatest lords round
Pisa, the Gherardesca and the Upezzinghi, along with a crowd of lesser
feudatories, were glad to be enrolled, whether as vassals of the arch-
bishop or without an intermediary, as Pisan citizens.
But there were motives which urged the communes to forcible ex-
pansion as well. There was the city food-supply to be assured; there
was the security of the citizens, new and old, and their lands outside the
walls; there were inherited feuds and claims, ecclesiastical and secular;
there were the freedom and safety of roads, the abolition of tolls and
blackmail, and the exit and entrance of the commerce, which took an
ever larger share in the city's thoughts; there was the independence of
the city itself to be preserved from ancient or invented feudal claims. If
lesser nobles could be both troublesome neighbours and a tempting prey,
it was the surviving greater houses, strong in fiefs and vassals, who were
most dangerous. For many years Florence waged war with her neigh-
bours, the Counts Guidi, heirs in some degree of Matilda, and the
Alberti of Prato, thus gaining by slow progresses, and the capture of
castle after castle, the control of her immediate surroundings. Siena
slowly mastered the powerful counts around her in the same twelfth
century. One usual condition of peace enforced by the victorious commune
was the compulsory citizenship and partial residence within the walls, say
for three months a year, of her vanquished enemies. This was only doing
by compulsion what so many nobles had done and were doing of their
free will, but while it gave the commune a stronger hold on the country-
side, it also, as we shall see, intensified the native disorder prevalent
among the half-feudal clans of the city.
Thus, as the twelfth century wore on, the great communes were
securing control of the greater part of their diocese or contado. It was
the commune which superintended in the last resort justice and peace,
and levied its vassals for war. There did not thence follow any difference
in the status of the serf, who remained subject to his immediate lord, or
the city which succeeded him. Nevertheless, a very considerable change
1 An ab-usus was a regular new exaction, a supra-usus, a capricious one.
1
## p. 225 (#271) ############################################
The rural communes
225
was taking place over tracts of the countryside in North Italy. The in-
habitants of the castelli or fortified townships, and even of lesser places,
were forming communes of their own, arising out of the necessary co-
operation between compossessing lords and vicini. As early
As early as 1093 the
Counts of Biandrate in Lombardy shared the jurisdiction over their town
of Biandrate with twelve consuls of the habitatores, appointed seemingly
from the ranks of the rustici, the peasants. They made a separate grant
to vassal nobles, milites, but these submitted to the consuls' jurisdiction.
All through the twelfth century we find petty communes arising and de-
veloping in Tuscany. They might begin from groups of lesser vassals or
freeholders or of freed masnadieri, organised in a community known as
Lombards—in this fashion we find the commune of the men of San Ger-
vasio in Val d'Era assenting to the sale of their castello and curtis by the
count whose fief it was to the Bishop of Lucca. They might be similar
associations of the villani or serfs of a vicinia or of a whole pieve. The two
communities often subsisted together in the same district, but they end
in being united as a communis et populus. With an infinite variety of
constituents and history, they were approaching throughout the twelfth
century a common type, the rural commune of landholders of different
status, governed by its elected consuls. It was rather local administration,
land-rights, and cultivation, than politics proper which formed the subject
of these township-communities. What was in process was the decease of
feudalism as an economic and administrative system, and its replacement
by co-operative arrangements which drew their origin eventually from
immemorial methods of using and sharing the land, all quickened to new
growth by a new prosperity.
To sum up this aspect of the theme: towards the close of the twelfth
century North Italy was subdivided into a considerable number of city-
states, the great communes, for the most part, though not all, ancient
episcopal sees. They were rapidly growing in wealth and population,
how rapidly may be gathered from the new and wider circuits of walls
they were constrained to build. Pisa already had her new walls by 1081,
Piacenza before 1158; Florence was building her Second Circle in
1172-4, Modena in 1188, and Padua in 1195; and the fact implies the
existence of important suburbs outside the old walls for some time pre-
viously. These vigorous towns were in perpetual strife with one another
and with the surviving great feudal lords, who like the Pelavicini, the
Estensi, the Marquesses of Montferrat in Lombardy, the Malaspina in
Lunigiana, or the Aldobrandeschi in Tuscany, held out amid the
mountains and the marshes. With these exceptions, they were ruling in
various ways and degrees their contado, the county and diocese sur-
rounding them, ruling from one point of view over a strange medley of
feudal vassals, freemen, and serfs of all degrees, from another over an
assemblage of petty communities, all illustrations of that method of self-
management by association and league, which was necessary for safety,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. V.
15
## p. 226 (#272) ############################################
226
Inter-city wars. Development of commerce
which was dictated by tradition and material circumstances, and which
was provoked by the decadence and abuses of outworn feudalism.
The energies of the communes were far from being wholly absorbed
in self-government, in internal production, and in the annexation of their
contadi. The inter-city wars went on with unceasing fury from year to
year, it might be said from century to century. Not till Siena was an-
nexed by Cosimo of Florence in 1557, was their series over. In some
degree these conflicts had their rise in sheer antipathy and jealousy. The
strongly-marked character of each commune, its intense local patriotisin,
made its neighbours its enemies. Old disputes over diocesan boundaries,
as between Pisa and Lucca, Siena and Arezzo, or over feudal claims of
superiority, as between Milan and Lodi, furnished grounds for dispute
where sentiment had free play. The moral shortcomings of each Italian
town are enshrined in civic proverbs and in Dante. But far more im-
portant were the causes of strife which arose from the mutual relations
of towns depending on commerce for their prosperity and independence.
Geography and trade in combination were the most explosive compound
of nature and art. Seaports were rivals in a narrow but profitable
market, when piracy and trading went hand in hand. By land there was
the outlet to the sea, or a toll-free road by land, as well as rivalry in
manufacture, to create discord. Commercial competition for the pro-
tection of home-industry or the possession of the carrying-trade was the
staple of these city-wars.
Effective though the Crusades were in making the Italian seaports
European powers, in increasing their wealth and the scope of their enter-
prise, and in enlarging the mental horizon of all Europe, they did not
begin the career of the maritime republics. The trade of these was of
natural growth, and it was rather in the pre-crusading wars with the
western Saracens, in the abolition of Muslim piracy, and in the opening
of sea-routes to the Ponent (the West) and the Levant (the East), that
they secured their pre-eminence. Venice, by taming the Slav pirates of
Dalmatia and defeating the Sicilian Muslims at Bari in 1002, was in a
way to become queen of the Adriatic. Pisa, sacked by Saracens in 1004
and 1011, could yet defeat them near Reggio in 1005 and, in concert
with Genoa, rescue Sardinia from Mujāhid of Denia in 1016. This
victory began the long wars of Pisa and Genoa, fought for the trade of
the Mediterranean and more especially for the exploitation of Sardinia
and Corsica. They were still allies against their common enemy, the
Saracens, but their joint capture (1087) of Mahdiyah in Barbary from
Tamim the Zairid, and the famous temporary conquest (1113-15) of the
Balearic Isles by the Pisans and Christian allies from the neighbouring
coasts (with the exception of Genoa), together with the Norman conquest
of Sicily (1061-1091), established Christian supremacy in the Ponent.
Thereafter, Pisans and Genoese fought one another with little relaxation
in East and West. Amalfi, once first in the Levantine trade, faded under
## p. 227 (#273) ############################################
The Tuscan communes
227
its Norman masters, and its sack in 1135 by the Pisans, in the service of
Pope and Emperor, hastened its decline. But the bull (1133) of
Innocent II which assigned Sardinia and half Corsica to the Pisan sphere
of ecclesiastical influence, and the rest of Corsica to the new Genoese
archbishopric, only resulted in a truce. The two cities fought for influence
in Sardinia, for trade with Sicily and the Ponent, and in the East there
was a three-cornered struggle between them and Venice. The strife of
Pope and Emperor, the Crusades, were incidents in and opportunities for
this civic rivalry. If Pisa at first took the lead and was predominant in
Sardinia at the close of the twelfth century, she was, nevertheless, fatally
hampered by her open contado and strong Tuscan neighbours. Genoa,
once she had subdued her Riviera, was secured by the Apennines from
inland rivalry; and during the thirteenth century Pisa slowly lost ground.
The geography of Tuscany was largely responsible for the inland
rivalries of the province. Across the encircling Apennines came all-
important roads from the north. By the Monte Bardone (now the
Pontremoli) Pass came the Via Francigena from Parma (joined by the
land-route from Genoa) to Lucca. Then it crossed the River Arno near
Fucecchio and struck south to Siena and Rome. From Bologna, the chief
junction-city on the Emilian Way, came two roads, one through Pistoia,
the other straight across the Apennines to Florence. From Florence
again two roads led to Rome, one westerly to Poggibonsi, where it joined
the Via Francigena and also a direct route from Pisa, through Volterra,
to Siena, and the other, the ancient Via Cassia, easterly, past Arezzo,
down the valley of the Chiana, under Montepulciano, to Orvieto and
Rome. From Florence, too, flowed the natural artery to the sea, the
River Arno, with its port at Pisa. To these trade-route factors should be
added finally the lure of fertile stretches of countryside for food, for
produce, and for men. Each commune was anxious for trade-outlets
under its own control, the power of controlling the outlets of its neigh-
bours, and for a wide subject-territory. Nowhere was the theory of
territorial corridors better understood than in medieval Tuscany.
As a result Pisa and Lucca were early mortal enemies. There were
disputed tracts of fertile contado. Lucca held both the northern outlet
of the Via Francigena and its crossing at the Arno. Pisa held its gate,
and that of most Tuscany, to the sea. Pisa fought to gain a footing on
the Via Francigena before it reached Lucca, to control the mouth of the
Lucchese river, the Serchio, and to remove Lucca's grip on the middle
Arno at Fucecchio. The Lucchese sought to compel all trade from the
north to halt in their city and pay dues there, and to prevent a Pisan
wedge intervening between them and Siena. Already in 1003 the two
cities, not yet communes, were fighting. Early in the twelfth century,
the struggle took a more permanent form, and the Lucchese became the
born allies of the Genoese in their war with Pisa.
While her manufactures, chiefly of cloth, were of small account,
CH. V.
15-2
## p. 228 (#274) ############################################
228
Florence. Umbria
Florence was seldom Pisa's enemy. They were not next-door neighbours
and Lucca's hold on the Arno was vexatious to both. As late as 1171
they allied against Genoa and Lucca, at the price of free trade and equal
opportunity for the Florentines in Pisa. But the terms were burdensome
to Pisa, and the Florentine advance southward was causing an opposition
of interests. Florence was endowed with a large contado and was anxious
to extend it, but was also anxious to free her roads to Rome and the
west. Thus she was hostile to Arezzo, a backward feudal hill-town, and
still more to Siena. Florence wished for the Val Chiana and its road,
and for Monte Pulciano, which would give her free exit to Orvieto and
Rome. She was also eager to wrest the cross-roads at Poggibonsi from
Siena, so as to have a footing on the Via Francigena and the road to
Pisa. The wars caused by this enmity, pursued through the twelfth
century, led to Florence ousting the Sienese from Poggibonsi in 1208 and
repelling them from Monte Pulciano. With these minor communes in
the Florentine sphere of influence, with the Florentine acquisition of
Empoli on the lower Arno in 1182, with the rapid increase of Florence's
manufacture, wealth, and power, the Pisans could no longer favour their
new rival's prosperity. The Italian communes, no more than ancient
Greek cities, were able to live and let live; their passionate patriotism
was wholly local; their institutions, sprung from small local units and
dictated by local needs, were by nature incapable of territorial ex-
tension; their interests were sharply antagonistic. No city could share
its freedom with another; rather, full freedom and independence were
only obtainable by the depression or even subjection of rivals. Thus we
find Pisa, which had of late immensely profited by its services to the
Empire, holding aloof in 1197, together with threatened Pistoia, from
the Tuscan League of San Genesio, which was led by Florence and pro-
moted by the Papacy so as to reduce the imperial interference, lately
made so real by Henry VI, in the province. Rupture and war with
Florence did not come till 1218, but it thenceforward continued with
intervals till the fall of Pisa in 1405. In the thirteenth century, the foes
of Florence are the Ghibelline Pisa, Siena, Pistoia, and Arezzo, Ahose
neighbouring communes in fact whose submission was requisite and
whose rivalry was to be dreaded for the free development of her com-
merce. Lucca was a faithful friend, but to Pisa's enemy.
The circumstances of the central band of Italy, of the Roman Cam-
pagna, the Duchy of Spoleto, and the March of Ancona, seem altogether
more primitive than those of the great commercial cities of the north.
Besides the Tuscan roads to Rome, the chief commercial and military
routes were the coast-road (Via Apruntina) past Ancona to the south,
and that roughly in the line of the ancient Flaminian Way which crossed
the Apennines from Fano and led by two main tracks past a string of
cities, like Perugia, to Rome. But these small towns fought rather for
land than for commercial supremacy. They were cramped for room in
1
## p. 229 (#275) ############################################
Lombardy
229
their narrow Umbrian valleys. Yet even in Umbria there appears a
tendency for the cities in connexion with the western route to group
round its central town, Perugia, in hostility to the cities on the old
Roman Way, with their leader, Spoleto.
It was partly disputes over their respective boundaries, partly the
desire for free, or rather preferential, outlets for their trade, which made
the communes so frequently enemies of their immediate neighbours and
allies of the city from which they were divided by those neighbours; and
these tendencies were increased by the fact that while a petty commune
not unusually accepted cheerfully a great city's overlordship and pro-
tection, those of middle size fought desperately for their full autonomy
and all autonomy could give. These characteristics are marked when we
turn to the geography and politics of Lombardy and the Romagna.
The whole of Lombardy between the Alps and the Apennines was
linked together by its natural artery, the River Po and its tributaries,
with the assistance of a few subsidiary streams, like the Adige, to the
east. Along these waterways the commerce of the land had arisen; they
remained the cheapest form of transit. The commercial outlets to the
north were by a series of Alpine passes: the Mont Cenis and Mont Genèvre,
debouching into the plain at Susa in the territory of the Count of Savoy;
the Great St Bernard coming from Savoyard Aosta to Ivrea; the Splugen,
the Septimer, and the Stelvio entering Italy at Como; the Brenner,
whence routes ran to Verona and Brescia; and the less known Strada
d'Alemagna reaching to Vicenza and Padua. To the south the chief outlets
were the ports of Venice and Genoa. At Venice was the meeting-place of
the trade from the Po and the Brenner and that from the Levant. At
Genoa the sea-trade similarly met that from the western Alpine passes,
focussed on the way at Asti and Vercelli. But there were also the land-exits
to the south. From Piacenza on the Po the Emilian Way went through
a series of wealthy cities till it reached Rimini on the Adriatic. Leading
from it there were the Via Francigena, branching off at Parma, the roads
to Florence, branching off at Bologna, and the Flaminian Way from
Rimini to Rome. Favourable positions on all these routes brought
wealth and greatness. It was the aim of every city to control as long
stretches of them as possible, and if possible to control exits over the
mountains and by the sea.
To the west Genoa was fortunate in an early domination of her
narrow Riviera and in the formidable barrier of the Apennines in her
rear. Her cue was merely to be sure that trade flowed steadily from the
inland emporiums which needed her more than she needed them. Asti
was mainly preoccupied in securing free transit from the passes ; her chief
enemies were the feudal marquesses (the Aleramids of Montferrat,
Saluzzo, etc. ) who survived in backward Piedmont; it became her ambition
to dominate the little communes which sprang up in the twelfth century
on the routes to the Western Alps, as it had previously been to enlarge
CH. V.
## p. 230 (#276) ############################################
230
Milan. Emilia. The Trevisan March
her direct contado. Milan, in the centre, was a more potent focus of dis-
turbance. An ancient capital, populous and powerful as the centre of a
wide champaign, a seat of manufacture at the meeting-place of almost
every route, she had every temptation for aggression. First, she is seen
gaining outlets ; she conquers and reconquers in 1118 and 1127 Como,
which blocked the way to the Alps', and Lodi (1027, 1107-11), which
lay between her and the Po. Almost at the same time began her enmity,
soon to become traditional, with the other capital, Pavia, and Cremona,
rival centres these of the transit commerce, and keys of the Po, no mere
entrances to it. Milan's natural allies were Crema and Tortona,
threatened respectively by Cremona and Pavia with the same fate which
Lodi and Como had undergone from Milan. By the usual chequer-pattern
of these feuds, Brescia and Piacenza were inclined to Milan, Bergamo and
Novara to Pavia. The oft-repeated wars were still being waged when
Barbarossa entered Italy and by his claims and actions gave rise to the
Lombard League.
Along the Emilian Way, for the same reasons, each city was the
enemy of its immediate neighbours. Piacenza and Reggio were at odds
with Parma, Cremona, and Modena. Through Piacenza and Cremona
this southern system was related to the central wars and alliances; through
Modena with feuds farther east. For Modena stood in dread of and
enmity with Bologna. Docta Bolonia, the centre of legal studies, was
great not only through her university but through her cross-roads. She
was eager to increase her contado, and eventually to dominate the minor
Romagnol cities to the coast, an aim which for a while she achieved in
her best days in the thirteenth century. This, however, was not yet.
She had not even entered on the wars connected with Venetian ambitions,
which gave some consistency to the politics of the Trevisan, or Veronese,
March. Venice aimed at controlling all exits to the sea from Ravenna
northwards at least, if not from Ancona. Against her, but severed by
their own disputes, stood Padua, Treviso, Ferrara, and Ravenna. But
Padua and Treviso were likewise on uneasy terms with their northern
neighbours and outlets, Verona and Vicenza, as well as at some variance
with the branch of the Otbertine marquesses who, being eliminated from
Milan, had their chief possessions round the small town of Este, and
thence were soon to take their title and surname. Mantua, impregnable
amid her marshes, was on her side at war with Verona over the important
limits of their respective contadi. To sum up, when the Hohenstaufen came,
there were systems of alliance and enmity ready-made, to be decorated
and in some degree inspired by the contest of Papacy and Empire. It
was in spite of these ingrained feuds, and as a testimony to the desire for
1 Most Lombard towns seem to have aided Milan in this long war, a fact which
shews how important the three northern passes were to them.
2 1110 for Cremona, c.
