The Age of Chivalry (7 page)

R
IGHT
A grisaille (monochrome) illustration showing life in a late medieval town. (From
Chroniques et Conquetes de Charlemagne
by David Aubert
, c.
1458)
.

Vibrant markets in both these types of German towns, as well as the possibility of practicing their skills as craftsmen, encouraged the migration of serfs who often left the rural areas without seeking their lord's permission. Urban courts came to accept the principle that a serf who had stayed for a year and a day within his chosen town was henceforth a free man. Population flows from the countryside increased accordingly, and the attempts by some bishops to continue treating these arrivals as serfs led the emperor Henry V to declare, in his charters for Speyer and Worms, that serfdom should cease in all towns. There was, therefore, a real enough basis to the common
German saying
Stadtluft macht frei
(“city air makes one free”). Thus encouraged at the very highest level of imperial government, the German towns acquired the institutions of self-government, including the
Rat
or town council. Headed by the
Burgermeister
or mayor, they started to create their own legislation and to raise money by imposing an excise duty. Groups of town merchants also began to issue the legislation that governed their trading activities.

THE BIRTH OF THE CITY-STATE

1073
The city of Worms affirms its independence by providing the emperor Henry IV with refuge at a time when German princes are rebelling against imperial authority.

1155
Arnold of Brescia is burned to death having sought to revive ancient Roman republican institutions while leading the commune of Rome in the late 1140s.

1162
Following Frederick I Barbarossa's attack on the city of Milan a revolt directed against the emperor spreads to other north Italian towns, that combine to form (
c
.1167) the military alliance known as the Lombard League.

1176
The Lombard League inflicts a defeat on Barbarossa's forces at the Battle of Legnano.

1248
The emperor Frederick II is defeated at the Battle of Parma.

1250
A popular rebellion in Florence expels the republic's nobility from power.

1294
Election of Benedetto Caetani as Pope Boniface VIII. The pro-papal Guelph party divides subsequently into a “Black” and a “White” faction. Black Guelphs support Boniface's interpretation of papal authority. White Guelphs advocate the extension of constitutional rights in Florence.

Bishops often took a dim view of these developments, and in the 13th century they began lobbying the imperial court to issue decrees limiting the powers of the
Rat
. These attempts at restoring the episcopal initiative proved futile, and the establishment of craft guilds had long since entrenched the cause of town independence among the wider urban population. Craftsmen such as bakers, butchers and shoemakers who brought their produce to markets had been subjected to quality control by town authorities since Carolingian times, and the “masters” were the individuals who represented their fellow craftsmen at such inspections from the ninth century onward. These practitioners subsequently claimed the right to elect their master as well as to play a role in framing the by-laws regulating the production and sale of their wares. These successful attempts at self-regulation encountered further opposition from bishops keen on maintaining their own authority. Nevertheless, the craft guilds' societies—sometimes called the
bruderschaft
or fraternity, and which were devoted to social, philanthropic and religious activity—were keenly supported by the Church. Episcopal opposition to trading self-regulation waned accordingly, and the craft guilds that spread from their German origins to neighboring lands became a distinctive feature of Western European urban existence.

The fact that the bishops owed their original authority in the German towns to an imperial delegation of power proved useful if it became necessary to defend urban autonomy. In 1073, for example, the citizens of Worms rebelled successfully against their bishop in order to provide a place of refuge for the emperor Henry IV at a time when he faced a German princely revolt. Bishops could therefore be reminded on occasions that they were in fact mere representatives of the imperial authority rather than lords exercising power in their own name. The
Vogt
was an official who presided over each town's chief court of law as the senior legal officer appointed by the bishop, but he received the
ban
or power of executing justice directly from the king or emperor. And during the period when the emperor held a diet or imperial council in a particular town, he and his circle of officials resumed control of all the powers that had once been delegated to the locality by his imperial predecessor. The independence of the “imperial free cities”
of medieval Germany, such as Basel, Speyer, Regensburg, Worms and Cologne, was based on these early developments, and their numbers were greatly augmented when the Staufer dynasty established towns on its own demesne land in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Independence nonetheless proved to be quite compatible with oligarchy. A small number of rich families dominated the towns' councils, which included the craftsmen whose guilds sought to exclude competition by adopting protectionist measures.

From the 11th to the 13th centuries northern Italy was Europe's most densely populated region as well as the richest. It was also home to a myriad of vigorously independent city-states, each of which would eventually succumb to a system of political control exercised by a single powerful individual (the
Signoria
) despite the maintenance of republican constitutional forms. Italian political turbulence took its cue from the nobility who, in contrast to their German equivalents, established their headquarters in the towns that consequently witnessed intense conflicts between the
capitani
or greater nobility, the
valvassori
or lesser nobility, and the
popolo
or mass of the population who included affluent merchants.

Lombardy's prosperous and well-fortified towns were in the front line of the struggle to maintain Italian city-state independence against the expansionist ambitions of German emperors. Geography also explains their central economic role. The Po valley connected the trading networks of the Middle East with Western Europe, which was well served by the itinerant Lombard merchants—many of whom also acted as bankers to the Holy See. Temporal authority exercised by bishops was an early casualty of the city-states' assertiveness, but the papacy was nonetheless a willing ally in the joint struggle against the threat from the German north. That danger did not stop these states from competing against each other initially for regional predominance, with the alliance headed by Milan clashing with the group of towns led by Cremona and Como. Frederick I Barbarossa sought to take advantage of this division while pursuing what he took to be his imperial rights in north Italy, but his military onslaught on the city of Milan in 1162 led to a general uprising that united the region in a common hostility. The Lombard League, which included most northern Italian cities, inflicted a decisive defeat on Barbarossa's army at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Frederick II was subjected to similar humiliation when he insisted on the unconditional surrender of Milan and its allies; his imperial army was routed by the Lombard League at the Battle of Parma in 1248. These defeats were significant economically as well as strategically; military power financed by commercial wealth had proved superior to an army raised by land-based feudal kingship.

A
BOVE
Simone Martini's contemporary portrayal of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, in Siena's Palazzo Publico, shows the Sienese conquest of the castles of Montemassi and Sassoforte in 1328
.

The constitutions of the independent Italian city-states at the height of their influence in the 13th century harked back to the peninsula's earlier history of Roman republicanism, with the commune's three components being represented by elected consuls who also presided over the law courts. Sovereignty was vested in a
consilium generale
or popular assembly composed of male citizens who, elected on a franchise restricted by mostly property qualifications, debated issues and selected officials. Service in the local militia was a near universal obligation, and the majority of the male population were therefore involved in public life to some degree. Many of these republics also administered a territory of dependent towns, but most remained small in scale. Florence, with its population of some 100,000 in 1300 was certainly large by contemporary standards; the figure of 15,000 inhabitants for Padua at that time was nearer the average.

Although their constitutions looked republican, the reality was that power at the highest levels within the Italian city-states was almost invariably exercised by a small number of influential individuals. This grouping was itself subject to factional squabbles, but these went some way to being resolved by the appointment of a
podesta
or chief magistrate who came from outside the city and who therefore stood above the locality's quarreling élite. This official was usually a nobleman and his elevation, as in the case of the Visconti in Milan, the Gonzaga at Mantua, and the Carrara of Padua, led to one-man rule. If this was the characteristic pattern from the late 13th century onward in the north of Italy, the towns of Tuscany, including Florence, managed to retain not just their communes and consuls but also some of the reality of republican liberty until well into the 14th century. Such republican survivals also preserved the conflicts that had become endemic to these city-state arrangements, and as the commune came under the control of the rich, so the lower orders among the
popolo
started to establish their own organizations. A popular rebellion of 1250 in Florence saw the
popolo
electing their own leader as well as 12 other representatives, and the republic's nobility were expelled from power in the first of a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions that continued for well over a century.

Venice's steady evolution as an independent state ruled by a close-knit group of patricians gave it remarkable stability. Executive power, the right to summon an assembly (the
concio
), and the appointment of tribunes and justices: all were vested in the
doge
or duke in the early eighth century shortly after the republic asserted its independence of the Byzantine empire. Other Italian city-states might experiment with republican politics, but Venice's ruling class steadily restricted the rights of its subjects.

The
concio
was only rarely summoned from the late 12th century onward. Instead it was replaced by a great council of some 450 members chosen by delegates elected by the city's six wards. This was the body that appointed state officials, and each of the wards also produced a member for the six-man executive council. Eleven aristocrats who were themselves chosen by the nobility elected the
doge
for life, and the fact that no
doge
could elect his successor accentuated the Venetian government's oligarchic nature. In 1296 membership of the great council was restricted to the descendants of a small number of aristocrats. The failure of Bajamonte Tiepolo's 1310 conspiracy to depose the ruling
doge
led to the establishment of the notoriously secretive
Consiglio dei Dieci
or Council of Ten, the executive that really ran Venice from that time onward.

Unlike other Italian city-states, Venice had not suffered from the intrusions of a rural aristocracy who brought to the towns and cities in which they settled the very substantial baggage of their own well-established patterns of feuding, rivalry and bloodshed. The business of Venice was business. Its aristocrats were not members of a feudal nobility but successful merchants who shared a common interest in commerce and in the maintenance of a stable political regime that allowed them to become even richer. That formidable solidarity created an enduring élite and, since Venice's earliest origins were barely seventh century, the city had no ancient republican history that might be evoked in protest at the irreversible diminution of liberty.

Rome, on the other hand, was the very fountainhead of the republican tradition, but it was the alliance of aristocratic influence with papal politics that predominated in the city's domestic politics. The commune of Rome, under the leadership of the monk Arnold of Brescia, sought to revive the ancient republic in the late 1140s. Cola di Rienzo attempted a similar feat in 1347 by expelling the aristocracy from the city and proclaiming himself a tribune. But these were short-lived experiments that ended in failure. It was tiaras and not tribunes that mattered in medieval Rome.