Secondly, there is the close
connexion
of
the city with its bishop.
the city with its bishop.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
Four days later, on the pretext
of their complicity in a plot, the queen and the principal nobles of the
kingdom were arrested. The Emperor has been severely blamed for these
arrests, and has been accused of having forged all the documents proving
the existence of a plot and of having caused the death of the prisoners.
He has been partially exonerated on this score. In 1194 there was no
blood-thirsty repression, and there apparently was a plot. On the other
hand, there is no doubt that, after the great insurrections against the
German domination which broke out in 1196 and 1197, Henry VI did
order wholesale executions. He not only punished the instigators of the
revolt, but also directed that some of the prisoners of 1194 who had
taken no part in it should have their eyes put out. Consequently, even if
we adopt the most favourable hypothesis, Henry VI's conduct must
appear excessively cruel, as he punished individuals who, having been in
German prisons for two years, must necessarily have been innocent of
complicity in the later events.
The fate of William III, last of the Norman kings, is unknown;
according to some reports Henry VI caused him to be mutilated, according
to others Tancred's son became a monk.
The administrative organisation established by the Norman kings
in South Italy and Sicily was not less remarkable than their political
achievement. Two facts dominate the history of the Norman organisation
CH, P.
## p. 204 (#250) ############################################
204 Legal and social organisation of the Norman kingdom
laws ne
and explain its methods: the very small numbers of the conquerors and
the sparseness also of the indigenous population. Even after the con-
querors had been strengthened by a further immigration, still none too
large, of their compatriots, they were never sufficiently numerous to out-
weigh the native races; they were obliged to attract settlers from all parts
to populate vacant lands, and to retain their ascendency they were led
to concede equal importance to the institutions, customs, and characters
of all the races they found represented in the regions they subjugated.
Hence although French remained the court language, the Norman
Chancery made use of Greek, Latin, or Arabic, according to the nation-
ality of those to whom they dispatched the royal diplomas. The same
principle recurs in private law, and in the preamble of the Assises of
Ariano in 1140 the greatest Norman king decreed as follows: “The
promulgated by our authority are binding on everyone. . . but
without prejudice to the habits, customs, and laws of the peoples subject
to our authority, each in its own sphere. . . unless any one of these laws or
customs should be manifestly opposed to our decrees. ” We find an ex-
pression of the same spirit in the manner in which Roger II and his
successors borrowed from various legal systems those elements of public
law which they considered most advantageous to their dynasty and most
easily applicable to the conquered country. Thus Norman public law
seems to be a mixture partly of Justinianean and Byzantine, partly of
feudal law. Recently H. Niese has endeavoured to prove that in Sicilian
law there was an element of Norman law, the importance of which he
may have exaggerated.
The greatest social change which the Normans introduced into their
new domain was, perhaps, feudalism in the true sense of the word.
Neither the Lombards of the south nor the Byzantines had known vassal-
age or fiefs, however much hereditary counts and nobles may have formed
a fitting prelude to feudalism proper. But by the reign of Roger II we
find a feudal hierarchy of princes, dukes, counts, and barons, holding fiefs
by military tenure under homage and fealty, and usually enjoying feudal
jurisdiction, at least in civil causes. Below and beside them stand the
simple knights with or without fiefs. Roger II, by decreeing that only
the son of a knight could himself be knighted, endeavoured to form the
whole feudal body into a kind of caste. In its general outlines this
system was not different from that of Normandy. The mass of the
peasantry were either actual serfs, bound to their plots, many of whom
(the defensuti), not unlike the German ministeriales, were specially liable
to military service, or men who, though personally free, held their land
by servile tenure. The new settlers, called in to people vacant lands,
were naturally favoured by their own customs. But there were also large,
if diminishing, survivals of non-feudal freeholders, mostly townsmen,
who fully owned their property absque servitio. Slaves were not very
numerous, and no Christians, save Slavs only, could by custom-law be
1
## p. 205 (#251) ############################################
Administrative organisation
205
bought and sold as such. The non-noble population as a whole were
liable to the angariae, i. e. the repair of roads and castles and the like.
The peasants had already adopted the habit of living together in small
towns for the sake of safety, and, just as happens to-day in Sicily, a man's
plot of ground might lie some miles from his dwelling-place. The
burdens on the peasant were indeed heavy and his lot was hard, but it
was mitigated by the growth of custom, favoured by his value to his
lord and by the strictness of the royal administration.
From a religious point of view the Norman kings borrowed their
conception of a theocratic monarchy from Byzantium, but their spirit of
tolerance mitigated the exaggerated results which might have attended
this principle. The “pious” king, the “defender of the Christians,"
insisted that he was crowned by God” and is shewn in the mosaics
of the churches receiving the diadem from Christ. It was, said Roger II
in his Assises, “equal to sacrilege (par sacrilegio) to cavil at his judg-
ments, his laws, deeds, and counsels. " Further, the privilege of the Apos-
tolic Legateship conferred on the Norman sovereigns an authority over
part of the Latin clergy in their dominions such as was possessed by no
other monarch of that period. Nevertheless they allowed free exercise of
their religion to the Muslims from the start, and to the Greeks after a
comparatively short interval from the conquest.
The administrative organisation established in their states was the
most characteristic creation of the Norman rulers. At the heart of this
skilfully constructed system was the king, who governed with the assist-
ance of the Curia Regis, in whose hands were concentrated all powers.
Gradually there came into being various departments, a Court of Justice,
side by side with a Financial Council (Archons of the Secretum) which
was itself divided into several sections (dohana (diwān] a secretis, dohana
baronum), equipped with official registers, according to the business with
which it had to deal. In the Curia we find both lay and ecclesiastical
vassals, as well as chosen counsellors of the king, the familiares, from
whom were recruited the members of the Privy Council (ń wpatalà kóptn),
known as the Lords of the Curia (Domini Curiae). Among them the
great officials of the kingdom held the chief place. The Emir of Emirs or
Admiral (ammiratus ammiratorum) had at first perhaps the charge of
the Muslim population as well as the command of the fleet, a duty from
which the modern title Admiral for a naval commander is derived, but
under Roger II the Admiral George of Antioch became practically a
prime minister or Grand Vizier. The office was left unfilled after the
death of Maio, and the Chancellor, whose office was also often left vacant,
was, when nominated, the chief royal minister. Over the finances was set
the Grand Chamberlain, who became the chief of the Financial Council
when that emerged. Dependent on one or other of the two great bodies-
the Court of Justice or the Financial Council—there were ranked the
officials of the provinces. These by the time of William II consisted of
CU. IV,
## p. 206 (#252) ############################################
206
Admixture of East and West
the Master Justiciaries, Master Chamberlains, and Master Constables (all
over groups of provinces), and the older posts of Justiciars (for justice),
Chamberlains (for finance), and Constables (for troops), each for a single
province. They had under their orders local subordinates, e. g. catapans,
strategi, viscounts, baiuli, cadis, judges, many of whom still retained the
old Greek, Lombard, or Saracen titles.
Thanks to this hierarchy of officials, royal authority was in all parts
powerfully exercised over its subjects. This is particularly shewn by two
facts. None of the cities in the Norman kingdom ever succeeded in
constituting itself a free town; even the greatest of them had at its head
an official appointed by the king. And, with very rare exceptions, none
of the vassals of the Crown, whose obligations towards the king were
regulated by feudal law, possessed the right of trying criminal cases;
these the king reserved for himself.
The power of the monarchy at home and abroad was increased by its
wealth. From many sources a treasure was amassed which was still con-
siderable when Henry VI captured it at Palermo. In addition to the
revenue derived from the royal demesnes, the profits of justice, and the
usual feudal aids (called in the Norman kingdom the collecta), including
purveyance, the kings raised a variously-named tribute analogous to the
English Danegeld, and drew large sums from tolls and duties, such as
the lucrative port-dues levied on the ships which thronged their harbours.
The kings themselves engaged in trade. The manufacture of silk, intro-
duced by Roger II, was a royal monopoly, and his royal mantle still
preserved shews how exquisite the new art could be.
Even in art we find the combination of various elements resulting in
a new and harmonious whole As creators or promoters of a civilisation
which was enriched on all sides by the most varied influences, the Norman
kings aspired to leave behind them witnesses of their achievements-
monuments capable of attesting the power and originality of a conception
which sought to recognise every living element in the races they governed
and to represent truthfully the particular nature, spirit, and quality of each
of these races in the close collaboration of all. Although some of the
monuments erected under their supervision have a definitely Eastern
character, such as the palaces of La Zisa or La Cuba, most of the buildings
which they constructed present a happy combination of Norman, Byzan-
tine, and Saracenic art. As the finest examples of this composite art
it is enough to mention the Cappella Palatina at Palermo, the cathedral
of Monreale, and the church of Cefalù.
The mosaic of manners and customs due to the juxtaposition of different
races was also evident in the life of the great cities of the Norman king-
dom. Never indeed was there any fusion between the races existing
therein. Greeks, Italians, Normans, Saracens, all continued to dwell in
the same towns subject to the same authority, but faithful to their own
customs and traditions.
## p. 207 (#253) ############################################
Decay of the royal house
207
The court at Palermo exhibited the same diversity as was elsewhere
visible. There the king appeared in a costume derived alike from Byzantine
ceremonial, from Western chivalry, and from the magnificence of the
Saracenic East. For his protection there were two bodyguards, one of
knights, the other of negroes under the command of a Muslim. In the
army there was the same mixture, Norman knights arrayed beside
Saracen troops in striking costumes. In the train of the sovereign, Latin,
Greek, and Muslim officials were in constant intercourse. At Roger II's
court the Arab geographer Idrīsi, the Greek author Nilus Doxapatrius,
and the Emir Eugenius who translated Ptolemy's Optics into Latin,
might be found side by side. Arabic poets composed poems in honour
of the royal family. Abū-ad-Dah bewailed the death of Duke Roger;
'Abd-ar-Raḥmān sang the charms of one of the royal palaces. At
William I's court Henry Aristippus translated the works of St Gregory
Nazianzen by desire of the king, and undertook the translation of the
Phaedo and the fourth book of Aristotle's Meteorologica.
Affected by contact with Eastern civilisation, the Norman sovereigns
allowed themselves to adopt the morals of their Moorish courtiers with a
facility which was a credit to their eclecticism, but which gradually
weakened their energy and dignity; and their example was undoubtedly
followed by most of the nobles at court. If the sons of the Norman
conquerors all suffered more or less from the pernicious influence of
these new customs combined with the effect of an unaccustomed climate,
nowhere was this degeneracy so rapid and so intense as in the royal
family. Most of the sons of Roger II died young; the number of children
diminished with William I, and William II was childless. The extinction
of the royal family only preceded the fall of the Norman domination by
a few years; it was at once a cause and a sign. Between the various
elements which formed the Norman kingdom, elements which differed too
widely ever to blend into a coherent and durable whole, the person of the
king supplied the only link, a link which necessarily disappeared with
his disappearance, for Constance was not regarded as the daughter of
Roger II but as the German Empress. With Henry VI there began a
new period in the history of South Italy and of Sicily, and it may be said
that the conquest in 1194 marked the close of the Norman domination.
CH. I.
## p. 208 (#254) ############################################
208
CHAPTER V.
THE ITALIAN CITIES TILL c. 1200.
1
No more characteristic phenomenon of the prime of the Middle Age
can be found than the self-governing town. It existed, more or less fully
developed, in the chief countries of the West, and we shall hardly err in
attributing its rise and growth to economic causes of equally general
prevalence. It was the resurgence of trade, of manufacture for a wide
market, after the anarchic, miserable ninth and tenth centuries, which
produced town and townsman, merchant and craft. The conditions of
the times imprinted on the medieval town other universal characters.
Safety and orderly life were impossible save in association, in group life,
and the associated burghers replaced or competed with the feudal or kin-
ship groups which preceded them. Local and personal law was the rule,
and the law of merchant and town took its place by the side of other
local and class customs. Central authority in greater or less degree was
shattered, and the town, like the baron, obtained its fraction of autonomy.
Whatever the degree of their independence, the shackled English boroughs,
the French towns in all their varieties, the republics of Flanders and the
Hanse, and the Italian communes, obey the same impulse and bear a
family resemblance.
Yet while the medieval towns are obviously akin, the divergences
among them in character and history are deep and wide; and most
aberrant from the rest, if the most pronounced and perfect of the type,
are the Italian city-states. Like their congeners, indeed, they owed their
florescence ultimately to geographical factors. Some, like Venice and
Pisa, were ports on the sea; others were halting-places at the fords or
junction of rivers, like Cremona; others, like Verona, were at the mouths
of passes; others punctuated the immemorial roads, like Siena or Bologna;
others, perhaps, were merely safe centres in a fertile land, clots of popula-
tion, which could produce un-bled by feudal tyranny. The whole land,
too, had a temporary geographical advantage: Italy was the half-way
house between the East (and Constantinople), with its civilisation, its
luxury, and its arts, and the West, hungry for these amenities, the
most extravagant of purchasers. But, save the last, these advantages of
site were old, and the Italian cities, for the most part, were old too, or
at least conscious children of the past like Venice, and in their history
their inheritance counts for much. Bruges and Bristol were new growths,
1
1
1
## p. 209 (#255) ############################################
The towns in non-Lombard Italy
209
Padua and Milan started as cities on their medieval career. In the wreck
of the Roman Empire, at the coming of the Lombards, they had indeed
lost, even in Byzantine territory, the greater part of their city institutions
of antiquity. They were transformed beyond recognition perhaps, but
not beyond identity. The attempts of historians to shew a continuous
existence of the main institutions of civic government from Theodosius
to Frederick Barbarossa have failed, though in rare cases an office or a
title might outlive the welter; but civic instinct, civic co-operation could
survive and blend with new elements under new conditions after centuries
of revolution. For the understanding of the new growth it is necessary
first to look, though too often by a flickering and uncertain light, at the
dubious remnants of the ancient order.
It is natural that the clearest traces of late Roman institutions should
be found in those Italian cities which fell into Lombard hands either late
or never. A general description of their government before the Frankish
conquest has already been given in a previous volume', and here it will
only be necessary to touch on their organisation in Frankish and post-
Frankish times. We find that at Ravenna and Naples the curiales are
no longer a governing magisterial assembly, but a college of notaries; in
fact the town office-staff had survived the assembly they had served.
Ravenna, however, still possessed a Senate of nobles, though it may
be
questioned if it ever met as an administrative body. Its chief members,
the dukes, who belonged to but a few great families, had individually
judicial and administrative powers; and its secondary members, the
consuls, may have had some functions. At Naples consul was merely a
title enjoyed like other Byzantine ranks by many of the nobility,
i. e. of the wealthier landowners. At Rome the Senate as an assembly
had disappeared, although the title Senator belonged to the greatest
noble family. There the consules et duces, a combined title for which
that of consules Romanorum was substituted before A. D. 1000, had some
of the functions of the Ravennate dukes, while the plain consuls seem
merely to hold a title, and possibly might not be of noble birth”. The
city-militia, ranged in twelve local regiments (numeri, bandi, or scholae),
formed the nearest approach to a popular assembly in Ravenna and Rome,
while at Naples the milites were more like a warrior caste beneath the
nobles. In all three towns there are traces of the ancient trade-corpora-
tions (scholae) still subsisting. Alike in all, however, real authority is
derived, in Byzantine fashion, from the ruler, the Duke at Naples, the
Pope at Rome, and is wielded by his bureaucracy, of which the dukes
at Ravenna and the consules et duces at Rome were only subordinate
1 Vol. 11, Chap. vil(a).
? But the notaries who were consuls (L. Halphen, Études sur l'administration
de Rome au Moyen Âge, p. 29, n. 3) may well have been nobles like those of
Ravenna in the eleventh century. See G. Buzzi, Le curie arcivescovile e cittadina
di Ravenna, BISI, 35, p. 54.
14
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH, V.
## p. 210 (#256) ############################################
210
The towns in Lombard Italy
members. The distance of Ravenna from Rome, and the desire of its
archbishop to rule it in opposition to the Pope's rights, may have allowed
a Ravennate Senate to continue; the material power of the great Roman
landowners and the local patriotism of the Roman militia may have raised
Alberic as their elected prince to exercise the temporal prerogatives of
the Popes; but in the tenth century no commune, no republican city,
save Venice perhaps, exists in Italy.
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.
of their complicity in a plot, the queen and the principal nobles of the
kingdom were arrested. The Emperor has been severely blamed for these
arrests, and has been accused of having forged all the documents proving
the existence of a plot and of having caused the death of the prisoners.
He has been partially exonerated on this score. In 1194 there was no
blood-thirsty repression, and there apparently was a plot. On the other
hand, there is no doubt that, after the great insurrections against the
German domination which broke out in 1196 and 1197, Henry VI did
order wholesale executions. He not only punished the instigators of the
revolt, but also directed that some of the prisoners of 1194 who had
taken no part in it should have their eyes put out. Consequently, even if
we adopt the most favourable hypothesis, Henry VI's conduct must
appear excessively cruel, as he punished individuals who, having been in
German prisons for two years, must necessarily have been innocent of
complicity in the later events.
The fate of William III, last of the Norman kings, is unknown;
according to some reports Henry VI caused him to be mutilated, according
to others Tancred's son became a monk.
The administrative organisation established by the Norman kings
in South Italy and Sicily was not less remarkable than their political
achievement. Two facts dominate the history of the Norman organisation
CH, P.
## p. 204 (#250) ############################################
204 Legal and social organisation of the Norman kingdom
laws ne
and explain its methods: the very small numbers of the conquerors and
the sparseness also of the indigenous population. Even after the con-
querors had been strengthened by a further immigration, still none too
large, of their compatriots, they were never sufficiently numerous to out-
weigh the native races; they were obliged to attract settlers from all parts
to populate vacant lands, and to retain their ascendency they were led
to concede equal importance to the institutions, customs, and characters
of all the races they found represented in the regions they subjugated.
Hence although French remained the court language, the Norman
Chancery made use of Greek, Latin, or Arabic, according to the nation-
ality of those to whom they dispatched the royal diplomas. The same
principle recurs in private law, and in the preamble of the Assises of
Ariano in 1140 the greatest Norman king decreed as follows: “The
promulgated by our authority are binding on everyone. . . but
without prejudice to the habits, customs, and laws of the peoples subject
to our authority, each in its own sphere. . . unless any one of these laws or
customs should be manifestly opposed to our decrees. ” We find an ex-
pression of the same spirit in the manner in which Roger II and his
successors borrowed from various legal systems those elements of public
law which they considered most advantageous to their dynasty and most
easily applicable to the conquered country. Thus Norman public law
seems to be a mixture partly of Justinianean and Byzantine, partly of
feudal law. Recently H. Niese has endeavoured to prove that in Sicilian
law there was an element of Norman law, the importance of which he
may have exaggerated.
The greatest social change which the Normans introduced into their
new domain was, perhaps, feudalism in the true sense of the word.
Neither the Lombards of the south nor the Byzantines had known vassal-
age or fiefs, however much hereditary counts and nobles may have formed
a fitting prelude to feudalism proper. But by the reign of Roger II we
find a feudal hierarchy of princes, dukes, counts, and barons, holding fiefs
by military tenure under homage and fealty, and usually enjoying feudal
jurisdiction, at least in civil causes. Below and beside them stand the
simple knights with or without fiefs. Roger II, by decreeing that only
the son of a knight could himself be knighted, endeavoured to form the
whole feudal body into a kind of caste. In its general outlines this
system was not different from that of Normandy. The mass of the
peasantry were either actual serfs, bound to their plots, many of whom
(the defensuti), not unlike the German ministeriales, were specially liable
to military service, or men who, though personally free, held their land
by servile tenure. The new settlers, called in to people vacant lands,
were naturally favoured by their own customs. But there were also large,
if diminishing, survivals of non-feudal freeholders, mostly townsmen,
who fully owned their property absque servitio. Slaves were not very
numerous, and no Christians, save Slavs only, could by custom-law be
1
## p. 205 (#251) ############################################
Administrative organisation
205
bought and sold as such. The non-noble population as a whole were
liable to the angariae, i. e. the repair of roads and castles and the like.
The peasants had already adopted the habit of living together in small
towns for the sake of safety, and, just as happens to-day in Sicily, a man's
plot of ground might lie some miles from his dwelling-place. The
burdens on the peasant were indeed heavy and his lot was hard, but it
was mitigated by the growth of custom, favoured by his value to his
lord and by the strictness of the royal administration.
From a religious point of view the Norman kings borrowed their
conception of a theocratic monarchy from Byzantium, but their spirit of
tolerance mitigated the exaggerated results which might have attended
this principle. The “pious” king, the “defender of the Christians,"
insisted that he was crowned by God” and is shewn in the mosaics
of the churches receiving the diadem from Christ. It was, said Roger II
in his Assises, “equal to sacrilege (par sacrilegio) to cavil at his judg-
ments, his laws, deeds, and counsels. " Further, the privilege of the Apos-
tolic Legateship conferred on the Norman sovereigns an authority over
part of the Latin clergy in their dominions such as was possessed by no
other monarch of that period. Nevertheless they allowed free exercise of
their religion to the Muslims from the start, and to the Greeks after a
comparatively short interval from the conquest.
The administrative organisation established in their states was the
most characteristic creation of the Norman rulers. At the heart of this
skilfully constructed system was the king, who governed with the assist-
ance of the Curia Regis, in whose hands were concentrated all powers.
Gradually there came into being various departments, a Court of Justice,
side by side with a Financial Council (Archons of the Secretum) which
was itself divided into several sections (dohana (diwān] a secretis, dohana
baronum), equipped with official registers, according to the business with
which it had to deal. In the Curia we find both lay and ecclesiastical
vassals, as well as chosen counsellors of the king, the familiares, from
whom were recruited the members of the Privy Council (ń wpatalà kóptn),
known as the Lords of the Curia (Domini Curiae). Among them the
great officials of the kingdom held the chief place. The Emir of Emirs or
Admiral (ammiratus ammiratorum) had at first perhaps the charge of
the Muslim population as well as the command of the fleet, a duty from
which the modern title Admiral for a naval commander is derived, but
under Roger II the Admiral George of Antioch became practically a
prime minister or Grand Vizier. The office was left unfilled after the
death of Maio, and the Chancellor, whose office was also often left vacant,
was, when nominated, the chief royal minister. Over the finances was set
the Grand Chamberlain, who became the chief of the Financial Council
when that emerged. Dependent on one or other of the two great bodies-
the Court of Justice or the Financial Council—there were ranked the
officials of the provinces. These by the time of William II consisted of
CU. IV,
## p. 206 (#252) ############################################
206
Admixture of East and West
the Master Justiciaries, Master Chamberlains, and Master Constables (all
over groups of provinces), and the older posts of Justiciars (for justice),
Chamberlains (for finance), and Constables (for troops), each for a single
province. They had under their orders local subordinates, e. g. catapans,
strategi, viscounts, baiuli, cadis, judges, many of whom still retained the
old Greek, Lombard, or Saracen titles.
Thanks to this hierarchy of officials, royal authority was in all parts
powerfully exercised over its subjects. This is particularly shewn by two
facts. None of the cities in the Norman kingdom ever succeeded in
constituting itself a free town; even the greatest of them had at its head
an official appointed by the king. And, with very rare exceptions, none
of the vassals of the Crown, whose obligations towards the king were
regulated by feudal law, possessed the right of trying criminal cases;
these the king reserved for himself.
The power of the monarchy at home and abroad was increased by its
wealth. From many sources a treasure was amassed which was still con-
siderable when Henry VI captured it at Palermo. In addition to the
revenue derived from the royal demesnes, the profits of justice, and the
usual feudal aids (called in the Norman kingdom the collecta), including
purveyance, the kings raised a variously-named tribute analogous to the
English Danegeld, and drew large sums from tolls and duties, such as
the lucrative port-dues levied on the ships which thronged their harbours.
The kings themselves engaged in trade. The manufacture of silk, intro-
duced by Roger II, was a royal monopoly, and his royal mantle still
preserved shews how exquisite the new art could be.
Even in art we find the combination of various elements resulting in
a new and harmonious whole As creators or promoters of a civilisation
which was enriched on all sides by the most varied influences, the Norman
kings aspired to leave behind them witnesses of their achievements-
monuments capable of attesting the power and originality of a conception
which sought to recognise every living element in the races they governed
and to represent truthfully the particular nature, spirit, and quality of each
of these races in the close collaboration of all. Although some of the
monuments erected under their supervision have a definitely Eastern
character, such as the palaces of La Zisa or La Cuba, most of the buildings
which they constructed present a happy combination of Norman, Byzan-
tine, and Saracenic art. As the finest examples of this composite art
it is enough to mention the Cappella Palatina at Palermo, the cathedral
of Monreale, and the church of Cefalù.
The mosaic of manners and customs due to the juxtaposition of different
races was also evident in the life of the great cities of the Norman king-
dom. Never indeed was there any fusion between the races existing
therein. Greeks, Italians, Normans, Saracens, all continued to dwell in
the same towns subject to the same authority, but faithful to their own
customs and traditions.
## p. 207 (#253) ############################################
Decay of the royal house
207
The court at Palermo exhibited the same diversity as was elsewhere
visible. There the king appeared in a costume derived alike from Byzantine
ceremonial, from Western chivalry, and from the magnificence of the
Saracenic East. For his protection there were two bodyguards, one of
knights, the other of negroes under the command of a Muslim. In the
army there was the same mixture, Norman knights arrayed beside
Saracen troops in striking costumes. In the train of the sovereign, Latin,
Greek, and Muslim officials were in constant intercourse. At Roger II's
court the Arab geographer Idrīsi, the Greek author Nilus Doxapatrius,
and the Emir Eugenius who translated Ptolemy's Optics into Latin,
might be found side by side. Arabic poets composed poems in honour
of the royal family. Abū-ad-Dah bewailed the death of Duke Roger;
'Abd-ar-Raḥmān sang the charms of one of the royal palaces. At
William I's court Henry Aristippus translated the works of St Gregory
Nazianzen by desire of the king, and undertook the translation of the
Phaedo and the fourth book of Aristotle's Meteorologica.
Affected by contact with Eastern civilisation, the Norman sovereigns
allowed themselves to adopt the morals of their Moorish courtiers with a
facility which was a credit to their eclecticism, but which gradually
weakened their energy and dignity; and their example was undoubtedly
followed by most of the nobles at court. If the sons of the Norman
conquerors all suffered more or less from the pernicious influence of
these new customs combined with the effect of an unaccustomed climate,
nowhere was this degeneracy so rapid and so intense as in the royal
family. Most of the sons of Roger II died young; the number of children
diminished with William I, and William II was childless. The extinction
of the royal family only preceded the fall of the Norman domination by
a few years; it was at once a cause and a sign. Between the various
elements which formed the Norman kingdom, elements which differed too
widely ever to blend into a coherent and durable whole, the person of the
king supplied the only link, a link which necessarily disappeared with
his disappearance, for Constance was not regarded as the daughter of
Roger II but as the German Empress. With Henry VI there began a
new period in the history of South Italy and of Sicily, and it may be said
that the conquest in 1194 marked the close of the Norman domination.
CH. I.
## p. 208 (#254) ############################################
208
CHAPTER V.
THE ITALIAN CITIES TILL c. 1200.
1
No more characteristic phenomenon of the prime of the Middle Age
can be found than the self-governing town. It existed, more or less fully
developed, in the chief countries of the West, and we shall hardly err in
attributing its rise and growth to economic causes of equally general
prevalence. It was the resurgence of trade, of manufacture for a wide
market, after the anarchic, miserable ninth and tenth centuries, which
produced town and townsman, merchant and craft. The conditions of
the times imprinted on the medieval town other universal characters.
Safety and orderly life were impossible save in association, in group life,
and the associated burghers replaced or competed with the feudal or kin-
ship groups which preceded them. Local and personal law was the rule,
and the law of merchant and town took its place by the side of other
local and class customs. Central authority in greater or less degree was
shattered, and the town, like the baron, obtained its fraction of autonomy.
Whatever the degree of their independence, the shackled English boroughs,
the French towns in all their varieties, the republics of Flanders and the
Hanse, and the Italian communes, obey the same impulse and bear a
family resemblance.
Yet while the medieval towns are obviously akin, the divergences
among them in character and history are deep and wide; and most
aberrant from the rest, if the most pronounced and perfect of the type,
are the Italian city-states. Like their congeners, indeed, they owed their
florescence ultimately to geographical factors. Some, like Venice and
Pisa, were ports on the sea; others were halting-places at the fords or
junction of rivers, like Cremona; others, like Verona, were at the mouths
of passes; others punctuated the immemorial roads, like Siena or Bologna;
others, perhaps, were merely safe centres in a fertile land, clots of popula-
tion, which could produce un-bled by feudal tyranny. The whole land,
too, had a temporary geographical advantage: Italy was the half-way
house between the East (and Constantinople), with its civilisation, its
luxury, and its arts, and the West, hungry for these amenities, the
most extravagant of purchasers. But, save the last, these advantages of
site were old, and the Italian cities, for the most part, were old too, or
at least conscious children of the past like Venice, and in their history
their inheritance counts for much. Bruges and Bristol were new growths,
1
1
1
## p. 209 (#255) ############################################
The towns in non-Lombard Italy
209
Padua and Milan started as cities on their medieval career. In the wreck
of the Roman Empire, at the coming of the Lombards, they had indeed
lost, even in Byzantine territory, the greater part of their city institutions
of antiquity. They were transformed beyond recognition perhaps, but
not beyond identity. The attempts of historians to shew a continuous
existence of the main institutions of civic government from Theodosius
to Frederick Barbarossa have failed, though in rare cases an office or a
title might outlive the welter; but civic instinct, civic co-operation could
survive and blend with new elements under new conditions after centuries
of revolution. For the understanding of the new growth it is necessary
first to look, though too often by a flickering and uncertain light, at the
dubious remnants of the ancient order.
It is natural that the clearest traces of late Roman institutions should
be found in those Italian cities which fell into Lombard hands either late
or never. A general description of their government before the Frankish
conquest has already been given in a previous volume', and here it will
only be necessary to touch on their organisation in Frankish and post-
Frankish times. We find that at Ravenna and Naples the curiales are
no longer a governing magisterial assembly, but a college of notaries; in
fact the town office-staff had survived the assembly they had served.
Ravenna, however, still possessed a Senate of nobles, though it may
be
questioned if it ever met as an administrative body. Its chief members,
the dukes, who belonged to but a few great families, had individually
judicial and administrative powers; and its secondary members, the
consuls, may have had some functions. At Naples consul was merely a
title enjoyed like other Byzantine ranks by many of the nobility,
i. e. of the wealthier landowners. At Rome the Senate as an assembly
had disappeared, although the title Senator belonged to the greatest
noble family. There the consules et duces, a combined title for which
that of consules Romanorum was substituted before A. D. 1000, had some
of the functions of the Ravennate dukes, while the plain consuls seem
merely to hold a title, and possibly might not be of noble birth”. The
city-militia, ranged in twelve local regiments (numeri, bandi, or scholae),
formed the nearest approach to a popular assembly in Ravenna and Rome,
while at Naples the milites were more like a warrior caste beneath the
nobles. In all three towns there are traces of the ancient trade-corpora-
tions (scholae) still subsisting. Alike in all, however, real authority is
derived, in Byzantine fashion, from the ruler, the Duke at Naples, the
Pope at Rome, and is wielded by his bureaucracy, of which the dukes
at Ravenna and the consules et duces at Rome were only subordinate
1 Vol. 11, Chap. vil(a).
? But the notaries who were consuls (L. Halphen, Études sur l'administration
de Rome au Moyen Âge, p. 29, n. 3) may well have been nobles like those of
Ravenna in the eleventh century. See G. Buzzi, Le curie arcivescovile e cittadina
di Ravenna, BISI, 35, p. 54.
14
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH, V.
## p. 210 (#256) ############################################
210
The towns in Lombard Italy
members. The distance of Ravenna from Rome, and the desire of its
archbishop to rule it in opposition to the Pope's rights, may have allowed
a Ravennate Senate to continue; the material power of the great Roman
landowners and the local patriotism of the Roman militia may have raised
Alberic as their elected prince to exercise the temporal prerogatives of
the Popes; but in the tenth century no commune, no republican city,
save Venice perhaps, exists in Italy.
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.
