Katie’s Reviews > Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century > Status Update

In 1138 Anacletus died, and Innocent II took over the city with no real rival in sight, with full international support, and with revenge on his mind."

HAHA

"Hildebrand / Gregory VII was the last heir of the ancien régime, the Carolingian and post-Carolingian papacy, represented most recently by the Tuscolani."

I've never heard this framing before, and I love it.

The forested coastal dunes of Pisa itself were jealously guarded by the cathedral canons, who extracted rents from (among others) the city's galley-men, when they needed wood for ship-building, reinforced by violent 'silvani,' or forest-wardens.

Stealing this for a novel someday.

"The Constitutum usus proudly states that the Pisans had mostly lived by Roman law 'for a long time,' a statement which, as earlier documentary sources show, was totally false.

So what is a civic, Roman-trained consul doing in the 1140s? He is thinking about the feudal world... Oberto’s lifetime political practice took Milan away from traditional hierarchies… but in his thought-world, those traditional hierarchies took center stage. When earlier, Barbarossa used Roman law to justify his claims to sovereignty... Oberto must have been particularly easy to convince.

It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say, 'shit.' The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this.

An 1130 judgment from Milan is important “because it is absolutely the only consular document ever to say that some consuls were capitanei, some were valvassores, and some were cives. Keller sees this as the tip of the iceberg, and argues that it is a guide to the fact that consuls were regularly chosen from all three strata, as Otto of Freising explicitly claimed in the 1150s; Grillo, among others, doubts that."

This was the backdrop to the unrest of the period of the Pataria in 1057-1075… [which in Milan was] borne along by a wider lay popular movement which… was well-acquainted with the commercial role of money, and was less willing than were previous generations to regard giving money in return for office as a morally neutral exchange of gifts.

Why would we assume that [communes] had a clear and consistent idea of what they were doing? Why would we assume that they would automatically feel that ruling their peers would be more honorific than remaining in the traditional hierarchies... And why would we assume that, once consular systems were established, their leaders would recognize that this was The Future, and simply set about consolidating them?

Wickham’s ‘ideal’ commune: “a conscious urban collectivity, usually held together by oaths; a regularly rotating set of magistracies, chosen or at least validated by that collectivity (not often in any democratic way, but at any rate not chosen by superior powers such as kings or bishops); and a de facto autonomy of action for the city and and its magistrates, including in warfare and justice."