A Historian of Germany Looks at the Italian City-State*

Tom Scott

Behind the seemingly quixotic title lies a straightforward purpose: to compare the development of the City- State in medieval Europe from a transalpine perspective. With a few recent exceptions – Giorgio Chittolini, Gian Maria Varanini, and Marino Berengo being the most no- table – Italian historians have paid little attention to City- State formation elsewhere in Europe, or else dismissed it as a late, partial, and stunted phenomenon. Yet a distinctive belt of urban and rural communes spanning central Europe across the Alps from northern Italy to southern Germany and the Low Countries developed after AD 1000, whose cities were able to establish, to varying de- grees, sovereign authority and territorial hegemony. What made them so distinctive, it has been suggested, was the economic and commercial dominance they exerted over against the feudal and military power wielded by monarchies and principalities – the contrast between «capital» and «coercion» posited by Charles Tilly1. As a historian of Germany (which in this context includes Switzerland), whose research has focussed on town-country relations, regional economic systems, and the rise of City-States north of the Alps, I hope to raise issues which occur natu-

* The author is grateful to Edward Coleman, John Law, Trevor Dean, and Chris Wickham for their comments on successive drafts of this paper, and to two anonymous referees. He is also indebted to the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest for the original invitation to deliver this research paper.

1 C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, Black-

«Storica», n. 47 well, Oxford 1992. 8 Primo piano rally in a German context but which at first sight seem to bear little relevance to the «true» City-States of central and northern Italy. Uncovering similarities and differences may prompt fresh questions about the genesis and character of Italian City-States. That, in turn, may encourage reflection about the classification of City-States in general which cannot be pursued within the confines of the present essay. I begin with a consideration of three methodological issues – first, the study of City-States within the academic discipline of history; then, the language and terminology deployed; and lastly, the historiography of City-States – before examining the «conquest of the contado», as it used to be called in Italian scholarship. After discussing the differences of origin and typology of City-States in Germa- ny and Italy, I turn in greater detail to four facets where the divergent trajectory of German and Swiss City-States may offer useful comparisons with the Italian experience: 1. the hinterland as a resource; 2. urban landholding; 3. citizenship in the contado; 4. jurisdictional exclusivity. Al- though the essay takes account of a wide range of recent literature, it cannot engage with many of the broader issues currently debated by Italian historians.

1. The academic study of City-States

In the German-speaking lands the rise of City-States has commonly been analyzed within the framework of town-country relations in the broadest sense, where historical scholarship has gone hand-in-hand with economic and historical geography. Indeed, there is a long tradition of historical regional studies (geschichtliche Landeskunde), which takes the entire human and natural endowment of a region as its starting-point, going beyond economy and geography to embrace culture, language, and ethnicity (though notoriously misused in the twentieth century by proponents of a racist ideology). One visible and invalu- able product of this approach has been the profusion of historical atlases covering regions, cities, castles, and settlement patterns. This tradition is much less marked in Italy, unless one includes the many recent multi-volume histories of its Scott, Italian City-State 9 leading cities which by definition take account of their contadi. Nevertheless, there is no independent academic discipline of historical geography, though recently there has been growing interest in the new cultural geography and its definitions of space2. As a result, there are few historical atlases of Italy; the project mooted in the 1960s to compile them never got beyond Elena Fasano Guarini’s study of the Medici state under Cosimo I3. Re- cently, however, the baton has been taken up once more in a national research project in five sections on the political geographies of Italy from 1350 to 1500, under the general direction of Giorgio Chittolini4. There has been little convergence between medievalists and economic historians over how control of the countryside was exercised: by economic centrality or by territorial dominion? The reason lies to some extent in the structure of university departments in Italy. Medievalists tend to be concentrated in faculties of Humanities and Education, whereas economic historians are mostly to be found in departments of Economics, Political Science, or Law. That has led to a deep cultural divide between History and Economics5. This division has served to reinforce the venerable distinction between cities stamped by their mercantile economy on the one hand and those by their political economy on the other. Or, to put the matter more concretely, between those historians who emphasize the Italian cities’ commercial imperative and capital accumulation, in which the

2 Cfr. F. Cengarle, F. Somaini, La pluralità delle geografie (e delle car- tografie) possibili, in «Reti Medievali Rivista», 10, 2009, http://www.reti- medievali.it. 3 E. Fasano Guarini, Lo stato mediceo di Cosimo I, Sansoni, Firenze 1973; Ead., The Grand Duchy of Tuscany at the death of Cosimo I: A historical map, in «Journal of Italian History», 2, 1979, pp. 520-30. But one scholar has recently noted «una certa pigrizia da parte degli storici nel tradurre anche in carte geografiche i risultati delle ricerche di ambito territoriali». See P. Guglielmotti, Introduzione, in Distinguere, separare, condividere. Confini nelle campagne dell’Italia medievale, a cura di Ead., in «Reti Medievali Ri- vista», 7, 2006/1, p. 11 n. 48. She excepts Sante Bortolami (cfr. n. 70) from her criticism, http://www.dssg.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/saggi/Confini_Gugliel- motti.htm. 4 PRIN 2006-2008: Geografie politiche dell’Italia dal 1350 al 1500. As- setti territoriali e dinamiche di sistema. Fonti, linguaggi, cartografia under the direction of G. Chittolini. 5 L. Provero, Forty years of rural history for the Italian Middle Ages, in The Rural History of Medieval European Societies. Trends and Perspectives, ed. I. Alfonso, Brepols, Turnhout 2007, pp. 151-2. Cfr. less precisely M. Ascheri, Le città-Stato, il Mulino, Bologna 2006, p. 197. 10 Primo piano countryside became a vehicle of exploitation, and others who stress the privileges and immunities of cities as autonomous communes defined by their corporate legal identity and self-perception. The latter aspects were stim- ulated by the early revival of Roman law, the university training of jurists, and the employment of notaries (who became members of the ruling elite and powerful landholders in the own right)6.

2. The terminology of the City-State

From the late nineteenth century the territorial expansion of the free and imperial cities of Germany and Swit- zerland has been an abiding theme of historical scholarship, though the earliest studies were largely preoccupied with issues of constitutional and legal status. Voices were soon raised whether the term Territorialpolitik with its ostensibly anti-feudal overtones was appropriate; some authors preferred to speak of a Landgebietspolitik, that is, the simple acquisition of rural estates with no long-term hegemonic ambitions7. More recently, Rolf Kießling has proposed the much broader concept of an informal hinterland policy (Umlandpolitik), in which a city’s inﬂuence over its surrounding countryside could be asserted without any recourse to territorial acquisitions8. That would accommodate the extraordinary economic sway exerted by two leading German cities, Augsburg in Swabia and Cologne on the Lower Rhine, neither of which possessed

6 G. Fasoli, Ceti dominanti nelle città dell’Italia centro-settentrionale fra X e XII secolo, in Nuovi Studi Ezzeliniani, a cura di G. Cracco, Istituto Sto- rico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Roma 1992, p. 8: «Ma anche i legum doctores facevano parte del ceto dei maggiorenti perché godevano di quell’autorità e di quel prestigio che derivavano dalla loro competenza speciﬁca e perché … si arricchivano, diventavano proprietari fondiari, entravano nei ranghi dei vassalli di signori laici o ecclesiastici, si imparentavano con grande famiglie cittadine o rurali». Cfr. G. Fasoli, Feudalità e città, in Structures féodales e féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen (X-XIII siècle). Bilan et perspectives de recherche, École Française de Rome, Roma 1980, pp. 365-85. 7 Cfr. T. Scott, The City-State in the German-speaking lands, in Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Nations, and Empires. Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., eds. C. Ocker, M. Printy, P. Starenko and P. Wallace, Brill, Leiden-Boston MA 2007, pp. 54-5. 8 R. Kießling, Das Umlandgefüge ostschwäbischer Städte vom 14. bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts, in Städtisches Um- und Hinterland in vorin- dustrieller Zeit, ed. H.K. Schulze, Böhlau, Köln-Vienna 1985, pp. 33-60. Scott, Italian City-State 11

(or were able to acquire) a landed territory. The modern ﬁxation upon areality, that is, upon territories deﬁned by clear boundaries which may be plotted cartographically, not only distorts the nature and location of power in medieval societies but obscures the strategy of those cities – members of the Hanseatic League, for instance – which sought not the radial control of a market area in their hinterlands but rather the axial policing of trade routes leading beyond their environs, and for whom the pursuit of a territorial policy was therefore largely irrelevant. In Italy the term la politica territoriale as such is uncommon. Indeed, it has been remarked that few studies of territorial policy sensu stricto exist, whatever nomencla- ture is used9. The term has been applied by Paolo Grillo in Lombardy, by Francesco Panero in Piedmont, and by Paolo Pirillo in Tuscany to characterize the foundation of new towns (borghi franchi)10; yet for the Veneto the establishment of new settlements (and churches) on the terraferma by Venetian abbeys has been explained by the need to secure food supplies, and explicitly distinguished by one historian, Sante Bortolami, from any conscious policy of territorial expansion, though the remarks below may qualify this judgement11. Only the Bolognese historian, Antonio Ivan Pini, has invoked the term la politica territoriale to characterize the broader outreach of cities into their countrysides in the case of Parma and Piacen- za12. This observation is more than a mere linguistic quib- ble. Rather, Italian historiography has traditionally pre-

9 P. Grillo, La politica territoriale delle città e l’istituzione di borghi franchi: Lombardia occidentale e Lombardia orientale a confronto, in Bor- ghi nuovi e borghi franchi nel processo di costruzione dei distretti comunali nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (secoli XII-XIV), a cura di R. Comba, F. Pa- nero e G. Pinto, Centro internazionale di studi sugli insediamenti medievali, Cherasco-Cuneo 2002, p. 48. 10 Ivi, pp. 45-97; P. Pirillo, Nuove fondazioni e politica territoriale delle città toscane: modelli di intervento, in Borghi nuovi, pp. 123-38, where the foundation of borghi nuovi is described as a component of «territorial consolidation», ivi, p. 130. The term is used by other authors in the volume such as Francesco Panero and Renato Bordone. 11 S. Bortolami, I borghi franchi nella politica territoriale dei comune veneti, in Borghi nuovi, p. 31. 12 A.I. Pini, La politica territoriale del comune città-stato nell’Italia padana: I casi di Parma e Piacenza, in Un’area di strada: l’Emilia occidentale nel medioevo. Ricerche storiche e riﬂessioni metodologiche. Atti dei convegni di Parma e Castell’Arquato, novembre 1997, a cura di R. Greci, CLUEB, Bologna 2000, pp. 139-57. But see analogous formulations, e.g. A.A. Settia, Il distretto pavese nell’età comunale: la creazione di un territorio, in Storia di 12 Primo piano ferred to describe the extension of cities’ inﬂuence over, and control of, their hinterlands as comitatinanza, a term coined as long ago as 1929 by the legal historian Giovanni De Vergottini in a conscious echo of Carolingian comital administration based in cities, which gradually passed into the hands of bishops from the tenth century, and thence to the city communes themselves13. Comitatinanza has been critiqued and revised by subsequent generations of historians. It is a more extensive notion than pure territorial expansion, including treaties of alliance and mutual protection between landed nobles, on the one hand, or rural communes, on the other, and their neighbouring cities, or else the use of civic courts to hear rural lawsuits. It therefore comprehends the many ways in which city and contado interacted in a dialectic of urban and rural communal growth14. The process of comitatinanza was chronologically so attenuated, moreover, that it could undergo radical changes of direction, as a recent study of Pisa in the 1230s has shown, where peaceful absorbtion gave way to militarily-driven arrondissement15. In a wider context, Andrea Gamberini has shown from his study of Reggio Emilia that comitatinanza often failed, leaving castles and jurisdictions in the countryside in the hands of powerful feudatories, an outcome, he believes, which was much more widespread in Lombardy and western Emilia than is commonly conceded16.

Pavia, t. III: Dal libero comune alla ﬁne del principato indipendente, Banca del Monte di Pavia, Pavia-Milano 1992, pp. 117-71. 13 G. De Vergottini, Origini e sviluppo storico della comitatinanza, in «Studi Senesi», 43, 1929; ristampa in Id., Scritti di storia del diritto italiano, a cura di G. Rossi, A. Giuffrè, Milano 1977, t. I, pp. 3-122. 14 A.I. Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni nel medioevo italiano, CLUEB, Bologna 1986, p. 66; S. Bertelli, Il potere oligarchico nello stato-città medievale, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1978, pp. 26-7; G. Milani, I comuni italiani, Secoli XII-XIV, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2005, p. 32. Cfr. in particular C. Wickham, Courts and Conﬂict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany, Oxford U.P., Oxford 2003. 15 A. Poloni, Comune cittadino e comunità rurali nelle campagne pisane (seconda metà XII - inizio XIV secolo), in «Archivio Storico Italiano», 166, 2008, pp. 3-51. 16 A. Gamberini, La territorialità nel Basso Medioevo: un problema chiuso? Osservazioni a margine della vicenda di Reggio, in Poteri signorili e feudali nelle campagne dell’Italia settentrionale fra Tre e Quattrocento: fon- damenti di legittimità e forme di esercizio (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Mi- lano, 11-12 aprile 2003), a cura di F. Cengarle, G. Chittolini e G.M. Varanini, Firenze U.P., Firenze 2005, pp. 47, 55, 57; at p. 59 he comments: «Non solo il Comune cittadino non aveva consegnato allo Stato regionale un contado compatto e ben organizzato, primo passo “di un vero e proprio processo di Scott, Italian City-State 13

There is a more profound reason why Italian historians do not have automatic recourse to the term territorial policy, since outreach into the countryside is often hard to separate from foreign policy or diplomacy – and not merely from the late fourteenth century onwards when the leading northern Italian cities were forging themselves into regional states and vying for regional hegemony with the duchy of Milan or the Papal States (as Gene Brucker has demonstrated for Florence)17. In Germany and Swit- zerland the relations between cities, princes, and emperors are indeed regarded as issues of foreign policy, but never the cities’ extension of territorial overlordship (bar- ring one recent and unconvincing exception)18. Is that to be seen as evidence of the deficient quality of statehood among City-States north of the Alps? There is, however, an even weightier consideration which helps to account for the relative neglect of territoriality. The primacy of mercantile interests in the cities which commanded the seas ensured that their principal concern was the conclusion of trading agreements, the removal of toll and customs barriers, the security of fleets against piracy, and the identification of suitable ob- jects for the reinvestment of profits, rather than territorial conquest for its own sake. In that regard their obvious comparators are the Hanseatic cities, not the City-States of southern Germany and Switzerland. The influence of the larger commercial and maritime cities such as Venice, Genoa, Pisa, or Ancona (which includes their role as ship- pers of grain from overseas) went well beyond whatever

costruzione statale su base territoriale”, ma perfino la territorializzazione del dominatus loci rimaneva nel Reggiano un processo non ovunque conclu- so». At p. 70 n. 65 he instances Parma, Piacenza, Bergamo, Brescia, Pavia, and even Milan! For an opposing view cfr. I. Lazzarini, L’Italia degli Stati territoriali. Secoli XIII-XV, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2003, pp. 99-100. 17 G. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, Prince- ton U.P., Princeton, NJ 1977, which brilliantly analyzes Florentine political debates in the era of the Visconti threats, where issues of foreign policy and diplomacy perforce involved consideration of the acquisition of strategic bulwarks and buffer zones within a system of shifting and unstable alliances. In Die Entstehung der lombardischen Stadtkommune. Eine rechtsge- schichtliche Untersuchung, Scientia, Aalen 1967, at p. 134 Gerhard Dilcher characterizes the first steps towards control of the contado as an aspect of foreign policy, but this argument is surely too strained. 18 D.S. Bachrach, Making peace and war in the City-State of Worms, 1235-1273, in «German History», 24, 2006, pp. 505-25. 14 Primo piano territory they might control19. In Giuliano Pinto’s words, they controlled a contado nascosto20, a hidden contado, which might take the form of a «displaced» contado overseas (witness Pisa’s and Genoa’s rivalry for dominion over Sardinia and Corsica)21, or else of genuine overseas colo- nies and trading outposts (for instance, Genoa’s holding of Chios, or Venice’s rule over Crete). In Genoa’s case, however, that did not preclude it from establishing control, albeit in competition with its own noble families, over the Ligurian coast, both on the Riviera Ponente and on the Riviera Levante22. Pisa, too, matched overseas ven- tures with expansion southwards along the Tuscan coast and absorbtion of the archbishopric of Pisa in the inte- rior23. That could apply by the same token to those inland and apparently landlocked cities whose economic activity was grounded in the first instance on international commerce and banking, rather than on local or regional man- ufacturing or industry. That has been argued in Tuscany for Florence (whose territorial aggrandizement was a late

19 K.L. Reyerson, Montpellier and Genoa: The dilemma of dominance, in «Journal of Medieval History», 20, 1994, p. 361: «Genoa’s sphere of influence was not the Italian peninsula, but rather the world of medieval commerce; the city’s interest was not in territorial establishment but instead in economic control». Cfr. G. Chittolini, A geography of the ‘contadi’ in communal Italy, in Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living. Essays in Memory of David Herlihy, eds. S.K. Cohn and S.A. Epstein, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI 1996, p. 420. 20 G. Pinto, I rapporti economici tra città e campagna, in Economie urbane ed etica economica nell’Italia medievale, a cura di R. Greco, G. Pinto e G. Todeschini, Laterza, Bari 2005, p. 9. 21 M. Tangheroni, Sardinia and Corsica from the mid-twelfth to the early fourteenth century, in New Cambridge Medieval History, t. V: c. 1198-c. 1300, ed. D. Abulafia, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2005, pp. 447-57; Id., Medioevo tirrenico. Sardegna, Toscana e Pisa, Pacini, Ospedaletto (PI) 1992; S.A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528, University of North Caro- lina Press, Chapelhill, NC-London 1996. 22 V. Piergiovanni, I rapporti giuridici tra Genova e il Dominio, in Ge- nova, Pisa e il Mediterraneo tra Due e Trecento: per il VII centenario della Battaglia della Meloria, Genova, 24-27 ottobre 1984, Società Ligure di Sto- ria Patria, Genova 1984, pp. 427-49; Epstein, Genoa, passim; G. Airaldi, Ge- nova e la Liguria nel Medioevo, in A.M. Nada Patrone e G. Airaldi, Comuni e signorie nell’Italia settentrionale: il Piemonte e la Liguria, Storia d’Italia, t. V, a cura di G. Galasso, Utet, Torino 1986, pp. 432-41, pp. 443-4, p. 448; G. Pistarino, La capitale del Mediterraneo: Genova nel Medioevo, Istituto internazionale di studi liguri, Bordighera 1993. 23 S. Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports. The Catalan and Tuscan Coasts, 1100 to 1235, Brill, Leiden-Boston-MA Köln 2001, pp. 182-3. Scott, Italian City-State 15 and largely unforeseen development)24, Lucca (the rise of whose domestic silk industry followed its financial and commercial heyday overseas)25, or Siena (which strove to develop – or exploit – its essentially rural and agricultur- ally backward hinterland)26: all of these cities sought outlets to the sea alongside control of their hinterlands. That was much less true of the Po valley in Lom- bardy and Emilia, however, where cities were clustered in a dense network, competing for space in an open plain with few natural boundaries, so that, in Daniel Bueno de Mesquita’s words, Lombardy was «a more intensely com- petitive geo-political environment» than hilly Tuscany27. The cities of the Po valley therefore had an existential interest in protecting and controlling their hinterland as a vital source of foodstuffs, manpower, and taxes, especially from the twelfth century onwards as the cities underwent a demographic explosion. Milan is the obvious exception here: on account of its size and economic clout it behaved more like mercantile cities elsewhere, imposing free-trade agreements on Pavia, Cremona, and Piacenza a century

24 G. Chittolini, The Italian City-State and its territory, in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy: Athens and Rome, Florence and Venice, eds. A. Molho, K.A. Raaflaub and J. Emlen, Steiner, Stoccarda 1991, p. 600; A.K. Isaacs, States in Tuscany and Veneto, 1200-1500, in Resistance, Representation, and Community (The Origins of the Modern State in Eu- rope, 13th to 18th Centuries, Theme E), ed. P. Blickle, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1997, p. 299. For Florence’s hesitant turn to the sea in the early fifteenth century cfr. G. Ciccaglioni, Il mare a Firenze. Interazioni tra mutamenti geo- grafici, cambiamenti istituzionali e trasformazioni economiche nella Toscana fiorentina del ’400, in «Archivio Storico Italiano», 167, 2009, pp. 91-125. 25 E. Fasano Guarini, La crisi del modello repubblicano: patriziati e oli- garchie, in La Storia: I grandi problemi dal Medioevo all’Età contemporanea, t. III: L’età moderna, 1: I quadri generali, a cura di N. Tranfaglia e M. Firpo, Utet, Torino 1987, p. 559; Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports, pp. 190-1. 26 W.M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune. Siena under the Nine, 1287-1355, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1981, pp. 175-6; Id., The Finances of the Commune of Siena 1287-1355, Ox- ford U.P., Oxford 1970, pp. 23-5; J. Hook, Siena. A City and its History, Hamish Hamilton, London 1979, p. 20; M. Ascheri, Stato, territorio e cultura nel Trecento: qualche spunto da Siena, in La Toscana nel secolo XIV: Caratteri di una civiltà regionale, a cura di S. Gensini, Pacini, Pisa 1988, p. 168. Cfr. also the remarks at n. 125 below. 27 D.M. Bueno de Mesquita, The place of despotism in Italian politics, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, eds. J. Hale, R. Highfield and B. Smal- ley, Faber and Faber, London 1965, p. 313. Cfr. J. Law, The Italian north, in New Cambridge Medieval History, t. VI: c. 1300-c. 1415, ed. M. Jones, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2005, p. 450. 16 Primo piano before any planned territorial expansion28. The earliest instances of control of the hinterland have been termed by modern historians una politica annonaria, a provisioning or victualling policy, or, in the marshlands along the Po and its tributaries, una politica idraulica (the phrase is Varanini’s), a policy of land drainage, reclamation, canali- zation, and irrigation29. In general, the inland cities of central and northern Italy which did not participate in grand commerce remained socially and economically shaped by land-holding as the primary source of power, wealth, and status, so that their immediate ambition was to reassert the ancient unity of city and contado manifest in the Ro- man civitas, as has been argued for cities such as Padua, Ferrara, and Mantua in Emilia (it is perhaps significant that they all succumbed at an early stage to signorie), or Arezzo and Pistoia in Tuscany (which were swallowed up by Florence)30.

3. The historiography of the City-State

Historians north of the Alps have been accustomed to regard cities, in Michael Postan’s famous phrase, as «non-feudal islands in a feudal sea». This approach has come under attack in recent years from two directions. In place of the traditional emphasis on legal and political authority being vested in ﬁefs and vassalage, the bonds which held society together are now held to rest as much on networks of kinship and clientage, which could eas-

28 P. Jones, The Italian City-State. From Commune to Signoria, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1997, pp. 276-7; G. Soldi Rondinini, Le vie transalpine del commercio milanese dal sec. XIII al XV, in Felix olim Lombardia. Studi di storia padana dedicate dagli allievi a Giuseppe Martini, Ferraris, Milano 1978, pp. 346-7. 29 P. Jones, Medieval agrarian society in its prime, §2: Italy, in The Cam- bridge Economic History of Europe, t. I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. M.M. Postan, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1971, pp. 355, 357, 359, 384, 390. For una politica idraulica cfr. G. M. Varanini, Processi di organizzazione territoriale nella Marca veronese-trevigiana e nel versante italiano delle Alpi orientali tra la ﬁne del secolo XII e i primi decenni del Trecento, in Die Friesacher Münze im Alpen-Adria-Raum. Akten der Friesacher Som- merakademie Friesach (Kärnten), 14. bis 18. September 1992, ed. R. Härtel, Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz 1996, p. 219. 30 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 276, 281. The smaller inland cities had always been controlled by landowners. C. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy. Central Power and Local Society 400-1000, Macmillan, Houndmills-Lon- don 1981, p. 86. He instances Lucca, Mantua, Arezzo, and Parma. Scott, Italian City-State 17 ily embrace patterns of civic afﬁnity and solidarity. This now widely accepted view has been given a particular thrust by Susan Reynolds, who in her book Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe questioned whether feudalism existed31. Her concern was not with feudalism as a socio-economic system of coercion and surplus ex- traction in a Marxian sense (a regrettable omission), but rather with sources of power and authority at grass-roots level in communes, parishes, and local assemblies. Ac- cordingly she concludes: «Even the greatest cities of Italy on the threshold of the Renaissance had more in common with the small towns of the foggy north than is generally recognized32». Unfortunately, these arguments fail to take account of recent research both north and south of the Alps33. The cities of Germany were far less antagonistic towards their surrounding feudal lords than traditional historiography, focussing upon the prevalence of feud- ing in Franconia, and Nuremberg’s exceptionally strained relations with the Franconian nobility, has suggested34. Moreover, the largest City-State north of the Alps, Bern, was not only dominated by a patriciate of landed aristocrats which only reluctantly ceded jurisdictional rights over its rural seigneuries to the Bernese council in the wake of the so-called Twingherrenstreit in 1470; its economy, too, remained essentially agrarian rather than commercial or industrial35.

31 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900- 1300, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1997², p. 9: «“Feudalism” and “feudal” are meaningless terms which are unhelpful in understanding medieval society». Her attack, grounded in a detailed critique of High Middle Ages sources and their terminology, is speciﬁcally directed against the conceptual system- atization implicit in the term Lehnswesen, rather than against Feudalismus (in a socio-economic sense). In addition, cfr. Ead., Fiefs and Vassals. The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1994. 32 Id., Kingdoms and Communities, p. 215. 33 A succinct critique of Reynolds is contained in T. Dean, Land and Power in Late Medieval Ferrara. The Rule of the Este, 1350-1450, Cam- bridge U.P., Cambridge 1988, pp. 1-6. 34 Scott, City-State, p. 53; H. Zmora, State and Nobility in Early Mod- ern Germany. The Knightly Feud in Franconia, 1440-1567, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1997; M. Diefenbacher, Stadt und Adel – Das Beispiel Nürnberg, in «Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins», 141, 1993, pp. 51-69; T. Zotz, Adel in der Stadt des deutschen Spätmittelalters: Erscheinungsformen und Verhaltensweisen, ivi, pp. 22-50; ‘Raubritter’ oder ‘Rechtschaffene vom Adel’? Aspekte von Politik, Friede und Recht im späten Mittelalter, ed. K. Andermann, Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1997. 35 Cfr. Berns mutige Zeit. Das 13. und 14. Jahrhundert neu entdeckt, ed. R.C. Schwinges, Schulverlag blmv/Stämpﬂi Verlag, Berna 2003; Berns große 18 Primo piano

But it is in Italy where the most startling bouleverse- ment has occurred. The venerable tradition which saw City-States as repositories of republicanism, commu- nalism, and liberty, and as champions of a new political philosophy which challenged the prevailing monarchism of church and state (Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Marsilius of Padua) and the doctrine that the sovereign was above the law (Baldus de Ubaldis) has been swept aside. In the words of its most formidable critic, «feudalism not only penetrated, it stamped the city world, its social, moral, even its physical fabric36». It is perhaps signiﬁcant that the most trenchant advocates of the north Italian cities as essentially feudal in character have been non-Italians: Philip Jones, Daniel Waley, and Chris Wickham in Brit- ain; Hagen Keller in Germany. The latter has insisted that Italian cities were in fact more aristocratic in social com- position and identity than their German counterparts, even to the point of importing to the cities personal ties based on vassalage37; this view has recently been echoed from a somewhat different angle by Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, who identiﬁes that section of the governing class from which the civic militia was recruited – the knights (milites) – as deriving its power (at least latterly) from feudal landownership: in other words, they were nobles on a par with those in other parts of Europe38. This becomes less surprising if we accept Jones’s view that the attraction

Zeit. Das 15. Jahrhundert neu entdeckt, eds. E.J. Beer, N. Gramaccini, C. Gutscher-Schmid, R.C. Schwinges, Berner Lehrmittel- und Medienverlag, Berna 1999; R. Gerber, Gott ist Burger zu Bern. Eine spätmittelalterliche Stadtgesellschaft zwischen Herrschaftsbildung und sozialem Ausgleich, Ver- lag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, Weimar 2001. 36 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 320. 37 H. Keller, Adelsherrschaft und städtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien, 9. bis 12. Jahrhundert, Niemeyer, Tübingen 1979; Id., Adel in den italienischen Kommunen, in Nobilitas. Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in Alteuropa, eds. O.G. Oexle and W. Paravicini, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, pp. 257-72. Cfr. the circumspect critique by P. Racine, Cit- tà e contado in Emilia e Lombardia nel secolo XI, in L’evoluzione delle città italiane nell’XI secolo, a cura di R. Bordone e J. Jarnut, il Mulino, Bologna 1998, pp. 123-4, which stresses that power in the countryside was vested in ecclesiastical institutions, such as convents, and lay lords as well as in bishops. Cfr. E. Coleman, The Italian communes. Recent work and current trends, in «Journal of Medieval History», 25, 1999, pp. 382-4; E. Occhipinti, L’Italia dei comuni, secoli XI-XIII, Carocci, Roma 2000, p. 26, n. 10. 38 J.-C. Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens: guerre, conflits et société dans l’Italie communale, XIIe-XIIIe siècles, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris 2003; Milani, Comuni italiani, pp. 54-5. Scott, Italian City-State 19 of the cities in the first instance lay as much in the resto- ration the ancient Roman civitas, in which nobles might attain public office and political influence, as in any mercantile activity39. Italian historians have on the whole now accepted this revisionism, but already Giovanni Tabacco writing of Asti had found feudalism entirely compatible with, or adaptable to, the values of the civic commune40. The point has recently been underscored by Giuseppe Al- bertoni and Luigi Provero in their book, tellingly entitled Il feudalesimo in Italia41. One oft-cited instance is Genoa, where milites and noble landowners engaged in trade and dominated civic life without abandoning the management of their rural estates42. Chronologically, these arguments are anterior to the quite separate phenomenon, much emphasized by Ital- ian historians themselves, of «refeudalization», that is, the resurrection of feudal vassalic ties in the age of the signoria, as traced for Lombardy and Emilia in the many essays of Giorgio Chittolini and his pupils43. Indeed, a genera- tion ago in a famous article Renato Bordone was moved to reflect on this development which he termed ritorno alla terra44. That, in turn, raises questions about the development of the City-State: whether its emergence can

39 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 117. 40 G. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy. Structures of Political Rule, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1989, p. 215. 41 G. Albertoni, L. Provero, Il feudalesimo in Italia, Carocci, Roma 2003, p. 103. I owe this reference to Edward Coleman. 42 Tabacco, Struggle for Power, p. 225; E. Grendi, La repubblica ari- stocratica dei genovesi: politica, carità e commercio fra Cinque e Seicento, il Mulino, Bologna 1987, passim. He notes, at p. 56, that Genoa’s naval forces were organized by the aristocratic consortia known as alberghi in a manner «privatistico-clientelare e non pubblico-patriottico». 43 G. Chittolini, Städte und Regionalstaaten in Mittel- und Oberitalien zwischen spätem Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, in Respublica. Bürgerschaft in Stadt und Staat, ed. G. Dilcher, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1988, p. 189; Id., Infeudazioni e politica feudale nel ducato visconteo-sforzesco, in Id., La formazione dello Stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado. Secoli XIV e XV, Einaudi, Torino 1979, pp. 186, 191, 197; Id., Il particolarismo signorile e feudale in Emilia fra Quattro e Cinquecento, ivi, pp. 207-8, 214, 219; Id., Poteri urbani e poteri feudali-signorili nelle campagne dell’Italia centro- settentrionale fra tardo Medioevo e prima età moderna, in Poteri economici e poteri politici secc. XIII-XVIII, a cura di S. Cavaciocchi, Le Monnier, Fi- renze 1999, pp. 118-9; Id., Principe e comunità alpine in area lombarda alla ﬁne del medioevo, in Le Alpi per l’Europa. Una proposta politica. Economia, territorio e società. Istituzioni, politica e società, a cura di E. Martinengo, Jaca, Milano 1988, pp. 220-1. 44 R. Bordone, Tema cittadino e ‘ritorno alla terra’ nella storiograﬁa comunale recente, in «Quaderni storici», 52, 1983, pp. 255-87. 20 Primo piano usefully be assigned to separate phases, and whether such phases betoken changes in policy and purpose.

4. City and territory

Italian historians used to describe the central and north Italian cities’ territorial expansion as «the conquest of the contado», with unmistakable overtones of aggression and exploitation. The term has now largely been discounted. Rather, there is now a consensus that the development of rural seigneuries went hand-in-hand with cities’ control of the countryside: it was a reciprocal process45. Few Ital- ian cities – Milan is an obvious exception46 – pursued territorial expansion from the outset principally by force of arms (though some gains and losses occurred much later as the result of wider warfare: Milan and Venice’s competition for control of Lombardy and Emilia in the ﬁfteenth century comes immediately to mind). The issue of exploitation is more controversial. Once again, language obtrudes. In English «exploitation» can have either a neutral meaning, the application of human effort to harness resources, or a pejorative one, the selﬁsh and harsh deploy- ment of manpower which does not receive the full reward for its labour. In German it is easy to distinguish between Ausnutzung or Verwertung on the one hand and Ausbeu- tung on the other, but the Italian sfruttamento shares the same double connotation as in English. We shall return to the issue of exploitation later. It is in origins, context, and chronology that the construction of territories in Germany and Switzerland dis- plays its starkest contrast over against Italy. Apart from those cities within the limes – Basel, Strasbourg, Mainz, Trier, and Cologne – the Roman municipal legacy was lacking. In Germany, the cities’ territorial outreach was

45 Cfr. the wide-ranging review by S. Carocci, I signori: il dibattito con- cettuale, in Señores, siervos, vasallos en la alta Edad Media: XXVIII Se- mana de Estudios Medievales, Estella, 16 a 20 de Julio de 2001, eds. J.A. García de Cortázar et al., Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educa- ción y Cultura, Pamplona 2002, pp. 147-81. Also in http://www.dssg.unifi. it/_RM/biblioteca/scaffale/c.htm#Sandro%20Carocci. 46 R. Bordone, La Lombardia nell’età di Federico I, in Comuni e signorie nell’Italia settentrionale: La Lombardia, Storia d’Italia, t. VI, a cura di G. Galasso, Utet, Torino 1998, pp. 340-2. Scott, Italian City-State 21 both late and limited, though contrary to received wis- dom it was not confined to imperial and free cities: territorial towns (those under princely rule) could pursue a policy of modest expansion provided that they did not infringe their overlord’s constitutional prerogatives or strategic interests. Indeed, the first city to contemplate a deliberate territorial policy was Erfurt in Thuringia which, although sometimes claiming to be reichsunmit- telbar, was in fact a territorial town of the archbishops of Mainz (until it finally lost its independence in the so- called Reduction of 1664)47. The development of the Swiss City-States was similarly late, and much more contingent than is usually allowed48. Apart from Basel, only Zürich and Bern were imperial or free cities with some room for diplomatic manoeuvre, in seeming contrast to the territories of Luzern and Fri- bourg (Freiburg im Üchtland) which were only consolidated after their emancipation from the overlordship of the Habsburgs, or, in the case of Fribourg, subsequently the house of Savoy49. Yet Fribourg’s territorial expansion was already under way in the fourteenth century, with explicit Habsburg sanction, as a counterweight to Savoy and Bern50. Until Bern’s conquest of the Vaud in 1535/36 (in which Fribourg and the Valais, both resolutely Catholic, participated in uneasy partnership), which nearly doubled the size of its territory to make it the largest City-State north of the Alps51, it was by no means a foregone con-

47 Scott, City-State, pp. 25-30. 48 A fundamental revision of the origins of the Swiss Confederation, with implications for the genesis and policies of the Swiss City-States, is contained in R. Sablonier, Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen. Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300, hier + jetzt: Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, Baden (AG) 2008. 49 Fribourg’s territorial policy can be traced to the period after 1384, when it enjoyed Habsburg support, that is, well before its final emancipation from Habsburg rule (1452) and Savoy (1478), in which year it finally gained the status of an imperial city. G. Castella, La politique extérieure de Fribourg depuis ses origines jusqu’à son entrée dans la Conféderation (1157- 1481), in Fribourg–Freiburg 1157-1481, Société d’Histoire du Canton de Fribourg, Fribourg 1957, pp. 165-70. 50 P. Ladner, Politique et institutions du XIIe au XVe siècle, in Histoire du Canton de Fribourg, ed. R. Ruffieux, Commission de Publication de l’Histoire du Canton de Fribourg, Fribourg 1981, t. I, pp. 188-93. 51 C. Gilliard, La conquête du Pays de Vaud par les Bernois, La Concor- de, Lausanne 1935, esp. pp. 66-7, 68-71, 109, 113, 115-6, 118, 168-83, 219. Bern’s territory in the mid-fifteenth century was around 3000 km², but to that should be added the lands held by the Twingherren, amounting to an- 22 Primo piano clusion that it would prevail over Fribourg to become the dominant regional power in western Switzerland. In Germany and Switzerland the cities which succeeded in carving out City-States were, with very few exceptions, not sees, that is, diocesan capitals. Bishops and their bishoprics were more often a hindrance than a help in the construction of a civic territory. The failure of Augsburg and Cologne to create City-States is in large part attributable to the political and territorial power of their (arch)bishops, even after they had been excluded from their sees and obliged to take up residence elsewhere (in Dillingen and Bonn, respectively). The permanent exclusion of bishops from their sees is one of the commonplaces of medieval German history52, but it finds little echo in Italy: the expulsion of rival bishops during the Investiture Contest was quite another mat- ter53. Where bishops remained in their cities (or in the castles looming over them), as in Würzburg or Salzburg, the civic magistracy had no hope of achieving internal autonomy, let alone external expansion. In Germany, the six largest City-States were not sees: Nuremberg, Ulm, Erfurt, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Schwäbisch Hall, and Rottweil. Strasbourg ranks alongside Rottweil, but had a curious territorial history. By the mid-fourteenth century the bishop has built up a large but scattered territory on both banks of the Rhine, amounting to perhaps 1400 km² – far larger than the city ever achieved at around 220 km². But Strasbourg exercised both direct and indirect dominion over Lower Alsace via its cathedral chapter and four other chapters with extensive landed estates and jurisdictions. When this vicarious influence is taken into account, the size and population of Strasbourg’s territory more than doubles54. In Switzerland, of the eight largest City-States – Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Fribourg, Solothurn, Basel, Schaffhausen, and Zug – only

other 2600 km². I am grateful to Roland Gerber and Kathrin Utz Tremp for information on Bern and Fribourg. 52 J. Jeffery Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City. The Episcopus Exclusus in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, Brill, Leiden-Boston-MA Köln 1999. 53 I ignore the Papacy’s local difﬁculties in fourteenth-century Rome! 54 G. Wunder, Das Straßburger Gebiet. Ein Beitrag zur rechtlichen und politischen Geschichte des gesamten städtischen Territoriums vom 10. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1965. Scott, Italian City-State 23

Basel was the seat of a bishopric (though the bishop had been excluded in the mid-fourteenth century and resided thereafter in Porrentruy). Four of the cities lay within the diocese of Konstanz (the second largest north of the Alps after Passau); Bern’s large territory straddled Konstanz and Lausanne, with the latter taking in Fribourg and part of Solothurn. The rest of Solothurn and the territory of Basel fell within the diocese of Basel55. Nothing could be further from the Italian experience. The cities of central and northern Italy – with the obvious exception of Venice, and also of Ferrara – could look back on an unbroken tradition from the Roman municipia, and indeed on a cultural and ideological level to the republicanism of Livy. It has been calculated that three- quarters of Roman cities in northern and central Italy were still functioning (though to what degree is unsure) in AD 100056; in Philip Jones’s words, «the commune was born old»57. In any case, cities’ relations with the countryside pre-date the rise of the communes. Although the comitatus was the organizing principle of Carolingian rule which evolved into the contado, De Vergottini pointed out that Charlemagne’s Divisio Imperii of 806 had already distinguished between the civitates cum suburbanis et territoriis suis atque comitatibus quae ad ipsas pertinent, though this may be too legalistic a distinction58. At all events, when in the pre-communal era the Saxon and Salian emperors transferred comital jurisdiction to the bishops they conferred upon them authority over the city and a surrounding area of between two and seven miles which approximated to these «suburbs»59. As Gerhard Dilcher has put it

55 Geneva’s subjection to its bishop came to an end in 1526 when the city was ceded to Savoy, which only recognized the city’s independence in 1603. 56 Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, pp. 5, 80. 57 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 131. 58 De Vergottini, Origini (1977), pp. 8-9. During the Hungarian inva- sions these «suburbanites» took refuge within the city walls and became jointly responsible for their upkeep. 59 Ivi, pp. 9-13, who deﬁned the area by its links to the baptismal font of the cathedral church. Cfr. Milani, Comuni italiani, p. 12. Lucca’s jurisdictional outreach, the famous Sei Miglia, however, was granted to the citizen- ry by emperor Henry IV in 1081 during the Investiture Contest as a reward for the city’s loyalty. Ivi, p. 18. 24 Primo piano

under the rule of the bishop the city, for the first time since antiquity, was clearly distinguishable from the surrounding countryside as an area with its own constitutional law60. This nexus has been expressed with her customary lu- cidity by Gina Fasoli: the cities of Roman antiquity, even when they re-emerged as diocesan sees or the seats of sovereign powerholders, be they Langobard dukes and gastaldi or Carolingian counts, never lost their public function, not even when ceded to their bishops, who administered them as public officials on a par with the counts61. The close links between city and diocese were evident not only in administration and government, but in kinship, too. The aristocrats who acted as notaries and judges in the early communes often had familial ties to bishops, from whom they held fiefs, and to their diocesan officials, or to the canons of cathedral chapters. When emperor Con- rad II in 1037 confirmed the inalienability of the benefices held by these major vassals (capitanei), and indeed lesser ones (valvassors), the bishops were deprived of any right of disposition over their patrimony, and thus of establishing civic episcopal lordships, as happened elsewhere in Europe. But, as Alfred Haverkamp has noted, by the same token, Italian bishops escaped permanent expulsion, which in the case of Germany and Switzerland allowed their sees to affirm their status as «free cities»62. The role of bishops and dioceses as points of crystallization for the nascent Italian communes is undoubted, aside from one

60 Dilcher, Entstehung, p. 63. He ignores any link to the suburbium, however. 61 Fasoli, Ceti dominanti, p. 5: «Le città... erano... antichi municipi ro- mani, divenuti poi sedi episcopali e sedi dei rappresentanti dell’autorità so- vrana: duchi o gastaldi longobardi, conti carolingi e post-carolingi. Le città non furono mai concesse in feudo e non persero mai il loro carattere pubblico, nemmeno quando furono cedute in perpetuo ai loro vescovi, che le am- ministravano come funzionari pubblici alla pari dei conti». Cfr. Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 101. Waley, indeed, goes one stage further in his study of medieval Orvieto, roundly declaring: «When… a town had not been the seat of a Count, its claim to its contado was based upon the area of its diocese, for the so-called “custom of the Italic cities” equated the area ruled by the city with the diocese of its bishop», D. Waley, Medieval Orvieto. The Political History of an Italian City-State 1157-1334, Cambridge U.P., Cam- bridge 1952, p. 29. Waley’s original text rendered mos as «law» rather than «custom», but no such law, according to Chris Wickham, ever existed. 62 A. Haverkamp, Die Städte im Herrschafts- und Sozialgefüge Reich- sitaliens, in Stadt und Herrschaft. Römische Kaiserzeit und Hohes Mittelal- ter, ed. F. Vittinghoff, Oldenbourg, München 1982, p. 175; Milani, Comuni italiani, pp. 15-6. Scott, Italian City-State 25 powerful dissenting voice, Francesca Bocchi, who argues that territorial expansion was driven by economic and political imperatives which paid little respect to diocesan boundaries63. Pierre Racine has also insisted that the power of bishops should not be exaggerated: it was located in the cities, rather than the countryside64. Perhaps bishops merely performed a maieutic function, and, like all midwives, they ran the danger of being marginalized once the infant communes began to ﬁnd their own feet, though they continued to play a prominent role in both civic and religious life well into the thirteenth century, as communes battened on to their prestige and pre-eminence65. But precisely because the Italian experience appears so radically different from that of cities north of the Alps, we should pause to reﬂect, lest the success of the Italian City-States becomes dangerously self-explanatory. German historians are familiar with the distinction between diocese (Bistum, Diözese), the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishop, and bishopric (Hochstift), that is, the bishop’s temporal lordship and estates: these were frequently far from contiguous. In Italy, by contrast, diocese and bishopric were effectively elided. The Ottonian emperors had granted bishops districtus, that is, (temporal) jurisdiction over cities and their hinterlands, so that over time the term was applied to the hinterland itself66. Haverkamp speaks of bishops in Piedmont, Lombardy, and Emilia extending their authority beyond the suburbium to the territorium civitatis with mixed success, even if they were unable to exercise any overlordship within the cities themselves – in contrast to Germany. What type of jurisdiction was involved and how it was exercised

63 F. Bocchi, La città e l’organizzazione del territorio in età medievale, in La città in Italia e in Germania nel Medioevo: cultura, istituzioni, vita religiosa, a cura di R. Elze e G. Fasoli, il Mulino, Bologna 1981, pp. 63-5. 64 Racine, Città e contado, pp. 117, 119. 65 Cfr. A. Thompson, Cities of God: The religion of the Italian communes 1125-1325, Pennsylvania State U.P., University Park, PA 2005. 66 Dilcher, Entstehung, pp. 56, 59, 61; J.K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy. The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000-1350, Macmillan, London-Basingstoke 1973, p. 23. De Vergottini has shown convincingly that the term districtus was in common currency long before its later use to distinguish between the leading cities’ contadi and those of the subsequently conquered cities. De Vergottini, Origini (1977), pp. 81, 88-94; at p. 99 he states: «Districtus (e termini paralleli), comitatus, episcopatus divennero cosi termini equipollenti e furono usati insieme e promiscuamente per designare il territorio dal Comune…». 26 Primo piano over territory beyond the city walls already in civic hands varied67. In Lombardy, as Renato Bordone has argued, the territory of the diocese was transformed into a «political» territory, its defence entrusted to the bishop’s clientele of military vassals in the face of weak public authority68. But in Milan, although there is no doubting that the boundaries of the archiepiscopate provided the fundamental framework for the city’s territorial policy, Ferdinand Opll has argued that it was the vast landed property held by the archbishopric and civic convents which formed the nucleus of Milan’s contado-building, not the exercise of public authority by the Ambrosian see: this is very much a minority view69. In any case, a note of caution should be sounded: Italian diocesan boundaries were not always clear and uncontested, even in the twelfth century, as Sante Bortolami has argued for the northern Veneto70. There is at all events a consensus that in Italy, unlike Germany, bishops governed as partners with the civic elites, pre- senting themselves as upholders of civic patriotism and promoters of the cities’ interests (as in the sees of Milan and Ravenna)71, and that, in Tabacco’s words, the cities’ path to self-governance accordingly followed a dialectic of «collaboration or the reverse»72. For that there is ample evidence. To take a wide chronological span: the

67 Racine suavely observes that this was «une époque où pouvoir spirituel et pouvoir temporal sont mal distingués par les hommes», P. Racine, Plaisance du Xème à la fin du XIIIème siècle. Essai d’histoire urbaine, Atelier Reproduc- tion des thèses, Université de Lille III, Lille-Paris 1980, p. 67. 68 R. Bordone, Le origini del comune in Lombardia, in Lombardia, p. 329. For Piacenza cfr. Racine, Plaisance, p. 60: «La distinction justice publique – justice patrimoniale montre bien que l’évêque sait reconnaître les domains propres à chaque justice, en séparant nettement le domaine de l’administration publique de celui de l’administration propre aux biens de l’évêché». 69 F. Opll, Le origini dell’egemonia territoriale milanese, in Milano e il suo territorio in età comunale (XI-XII secolo) (Atti dell’11º congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto Medioevo, Milano, 26-30 settembre 1987), Cen- tro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, Spoleto 1989, t. I, pp. 178, 182-3. 70 Guglielmotti, Introduzione, p. 4; S. Bortolami, Frontiere politiche e frontiere religiose nell’Italia comunale: il caso delle Venezie, in Castrum, 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Âge, a cura di J.-M. Poisson, École Française de Rome/Casa de Velázquez, Roma- Madrid 1992, pp. 211-38. 71 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 80-1; Haverkamp, Städte, pp. 176-7. 72 G. Tabacco, Northern and central Italy in the eleventh century, in New Cambridge Medieval History, t. IV: 1024-c.1198, Part II, eds. D. Lus- combe and J. Riley-Smith, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2005, 2, p. 91; Id., Northern and central Italy in the twelfth century, ivi, p. 426. Scott, Italian City-State 27 bishop of Mantua in 945 undertook to mint coinage for the communes of Mantua, Verona, and Brescia secundum libitum et conventum civium predictarum urbium73. Two centuries later Cremona and its bishop combined to clip the wings of the counts of Camisano: the bishop founded a borgo nuovo at Fornovo San Giovanni in 1189, whose inhabitants were obliged to swear a joint oath of fealty to city and bishop74. In general by the twelfth century the communes were engaging in joint enterprises with their bishops to promote and legitimate their territorial expansion – Jones instances a whole string of cities from Brescia, Bologna, Pisa, Florence, Siena, and even Ferrara faced with the archbishop of Ravenna75. He might have added Lucca76. But after the peace of Konstanz in 1183 the communes began to buy out or expropriate episcopal estates, rights, and revenues in order to expand their territories, Verona being a well-known example77. Unsurprisingly, given the bishops’ landed wealth and power, this was often a fraught process: Pistoia, Man- tua, and Vicenza found themselves at loggerheads with their bishops; in the case of the latter, two of them were murdered!78 And in Cremona, a century before the joint action against the counts of Camisano, there had been open rebellion in the city against the bishop’s temporal authority, admittedly during a rather different legal dispute over exactions deriving from fluvial rights that the latter had received from the emperor, which had first erupted as far back as 851!79 It is hard to disagree with Antonio Ivan Pini, therefore, when he argues that emancipation from episcopal overlordship was more difficult than where cit-

73 Tabacco, Struggle for Power, p. 172. 74 Grillo, Politica territoriale, p. 69. 75 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 361. For Florence cfr. G.W. Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society 1000-1320, Harvard U.P., Cam- bridge (Mass.)-London 1991, pp. 68-71, 75-7. 76 D.J. Osheim, An Italian Lordship. The Bishopric of Lucca in the Late Middle Ages, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1977, pp. 25-8, 70-3, where he concludes: «Thus the expansion of episcopal lordship would appear to have been little more than an extension of communal policy during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries». 77 Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 52; K. Brandstätter, Die oberitalie- nische Stadt und ihr Territorium im späteren Mittelalter, in «Pro Civitate Austriae. Informationen zur Stadtgeschichtsforschung in Österreich», n.s. 11, 2006, pp. 16-7. 78 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 363. 79 Tabacco, Struggle for Power, p. 327; Milani, Comuni italiani, pp. 14-5. 28 Primo piano ies had once been ruled by counts: he instances Parma and Piacenza, whose conﬂict with their bishops was merely a prelude to a more protracted struggle to bring the episcopal feudatories to heel, a struggle which was not accom- plished until the 1230s80. But the problems go deeper than this. It has been pointed out for Tuscany that the link between diocese and contado was weak, since there were several «fossilized sees», as Andrea Zorzi calls them, which never formed the basis of territory-building: he instances Fiesole, Chiusi, Luni, Sovana, and Grosseto81. Yet Luni escaped Tuscan territorial aggrandizement because it indeed remained ecclesi- astically and politically separate. The profusion of small dioceses in central and southern Italy, compared with the north, is often used as a partial explanation for the failure of so many cities in the Marches and in Umbria to establish themselves as City-States, yet a similar absorbtion of such dioceses can also be observed in the Veneto82. The fact that northern dioceses were in their turn much smaller than those in the Roman limes – perhaps 225-900/1200 km² as opposed to 2500-100,000 km² in Germany83 – suggests that successful civic territory-building depended on dioceses which were neither too small nor too large. In any case, central and northern Italian cities had no com- punction in reaching out beyond their diocesan frontiers if old comital districts could be appropriated, as with Si- ena or Bologna84. In the case of Siena, its territory ulti-

80 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 78; Id., Politica territoriale, pp. 143, 148-9. 81 A. Zorzi, Die Organisation des Territoriums im florentinischen Gebiet im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, in Hochmittelalterliche Territorialstrukturen in Deutschland und Italien, eds. G. Chittolini and D. Willoweit, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1996, p. 206. The phenomenon was not, of course, confined to Tuscany. A fuller list is advanced in M. Ginatempo, Le città italiane, XIV-XV secolo, in Poderes públicos en la Europa medieval: principados, reinos y coronas. XXIII semana de Estudios Medievales, Estella, 22 a 26 de julio de 1996, Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educación y Cultura, Pamplona 1997, p. 175 n. 2. 82 Cfr. G.M. Varanini, L’organizzazione del territorio in Italia: aspetti e problemi, in La società medievale, a cura di S. Collado e G. Pinto, Monduzzi, Bologna 1999, pp. 137-8. For Treviso cfr. Bortolami, Frontiere politiche, p. 221. 83 Haverkamp, Städte, p. 155. 84 F. Bocchi, Una campagna per la città. La politica annonaria delle città emiliane nel Medioevo, in «Annali dell’Istituto Alcide Cervi», 7, 1986, p. 68; Pinto, Rapporti economici, p. 8; Id., Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 67. The relationship could also work the other way round, as with Como, whose Scott, Italian City-State 29 mately absorbed five dioceses and encroached on several more!85 Parma’s county outstripped its diocese, extending eastwards into the diocese of Reggio to take in, at least for a time, the ancient gastaldate of Bismantova86. Cities could also give their names to newly formed counties, as with Padua and Novara in the tenth century: the fact that the term «county» spread rapidly throughout Emilia and Romagna in this early period87 suggests that the relationship between lay and episcopal administrative organization as the underbedding of cities’ expansion needs to be carefully weighed.

5. The chronology of the contado

The process of territory-building north of the Alps was not only late, it was chronologically compacted: few determined efforts before the mid-fourteenth century; little further arrondissement after the mid-sixteenth. In Italy, by contrast, the process was extremely protracted, spanning six centuries, so that one is naturally led to enquire whether it can usefully be subjected to a phase-analysis, which might link stages of expansion to changes in regime or economic conjuncture. To my astonishment, no Ital- ian historian, with the exception of Pini, has attempted any systematic phase-analysis before the emergence of regional states in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In Pini’s model, during the consular period cities established a protectorate over their contadi with neither overt exploitation nor recourse to military force88. Then, under the podestà they embarked upon a deliberate ap- diocese extended well beyond its county, ivi, p. 67, or with Padua: Borto- lami, Frontiere politiche, p. 222. 85 D. Boisseuil, La Toscane siennoise: territoire et resources (XIVe-XVe siècles), in Florence et la Toscane, XIVe-XIXe siècles). Les dynamiques d’un état italien, eds. J. Boutier, S. Landri and O. Ruchon, Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 2004, p. 149. The dioceses were Siena, Chiusi, Pienza- Montalcino, Grosseto and Sovana (three of which were among Zorzi’s «fossilized sees»), with encroachments on Massa Marittima, Volterra, Arezzo, and Castro. Cfr. also O. Redon, L’espace d’une cité: Sienne et le pays siennois (XIIIe-XIVe siècles), École Française de Rome, Roma 1994, p. 96. 86 Cfr. R. Schumann, Authority and the Commune, Parma 833-1133, Deputazione di storia patria per le province parmensi, Parma 1973, pp. 273-4. 87 Varanini, Organizzazione del territorio, p. 149. 88 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 77. 30 Primo piano propriation (or peaceful conquest, if you prefer) and organization of the contado; until, with the advent of popolo regimes, direct exploitation and stricter administration (above all fiscal) were pursued, but also some territorial disintegration occurred. The subjection of the contado, in Pini’s view, was judicial and economic, as well as military and fiscal89. While a looser phase-analysis has been advanced by Chittolini, it remains strenuously political- institutional90. It would be all too easy to criticize such a schematic model. Scholars have questioned some stages and accepted others. Paolo Grillo, for instance, drawing upon the Milanese experience, identifies a deliberate and violent struggle for the countryside in Lombardy within years of the first communal regimes appearing91; Haverkamp and Jones, for their part, concur in Pini’s characterization of the popolo period, where he emphasizes fiscal exploitation92. But that is by the way. The problems with Pini’s model, for all its usefulness as an analytic tool, are threefold. In the first place, it is not clear that different types of regime succeeded each other as neatly as Pini suggests, the alter- nation between consular government and rule by a foreign podestà in the decades straddling 1200 being widely acknowledged93. Mario Ascheri, furthermore, sees popolo and signoria regimes in the thirteenth century as parallel, not consecutive. Moreover, he detects no appreciable difference in their territorial aims: both pursued peaceful territorial conquest, neutralizing the castles of feudal lords and emancipating serfs94. Secondly, the purpose and practice of territory-building are not squarely addressed: were

89 Ivi, p. 102. 90 G. Chittolini, Signorie rurali e feudi alla fine del Medioevo, in Comu- ni e signorie: istituzioni, società e lotte per l’egemonia, Storia d’Italia, t. IV, a cura di G. Galasso, Utet, Torino 1981, pp. 591-676. 91 Grillo, Politica territoriale, p. 55; Settia, Distretto pavese, p. 125. Cfr. Milani, Comuni italiani, pp. 36, 72-3. 92 Haverkamp, Städte, p. 235; Jones, Italian City-State, p. 597. 93 Milani, Comuni italiani, pp. 62-3. 94 Ascheri, Città-Stato, pp. 131-2; cfr. Jones, Italian City-State, p. 519. Ascheri’s statement is all the more remarkable because he is the one Italian historian to swim against the revisionist tide by insisting that there was a clear legal-ideological divide between communal governments (egalitarian) and signorial ones (hierarchical), and that they should not all be considered as variants of oligarchy. M. Ascheri, Beyond the comune: The Italian City- State and its inheritance, in The Medieval World, eds. P. Linehan and J.L. Nelson, Routledge, London-New York 2001, pp. 451-68. Scott, Italian City-State 31 the cities’ aims primarily economic or political, and was their preferred strategy one of jurisdictional supremacy or ownership of land? A third qualification is altogether more conceptual. Maria Ginatempo, principally known as a demographic historian, has suggested a radically different approach, whereby city «state-formation» developed along distinct zonal lines: 1. Lombardy and much of Emilia, where rural lords retained much power; 2. Veneto and the northern Papal States, where communes and their signorie integrated rural lords into their dominion; 3. Tus- cany, Umbria, and much of central Italy, which remained riven by factionalism, though not on the scale of Lom- bardy, and where the characteristic «Lombard» solution of strong princely regimes based on the rule of one or two cities by dynasts rarely prevailed95. This typology, drawing upon a blend of geopolitics and socio-institutional evolution, may help to overcome the rather sterile question over the intrinsic character of certain types of regime and their consequent contado policies. A final subversive thought obtrudes: the extension of cities’ territorial control was never simple or straightforward. It spread, in Sergio Bertelli’s famous image, randomly like a leopard’s spots, rather than evenly like a patch of oil96. Even the Florentine state, too often regarded as a benchmark of deliberate and aggressive territory-building, was, in Zorzi’s judgement, constructed by improvisation, not a master- plan97. There is no space here to explore these general issues further. Instead I will now turn to the four specific

95 Ginatempo, Città italiane, pp. 174-209. Hints of a zonal system in Lombardy based on geopolitical differences can be found in M. Vallera- ni, La politica degli schieramenti: reti podestarile e alleanze intercittadine nella prima metà del Duecento, in Lombardia, pp. 435-43, who identiﬁes two political-territorial systems at work: that of Cremona, tending towards polycentrism based on compacts with communes in the central Po valley; and that of Milan, tending to monocentrism based on an extensive («capil- lary»: in Italian in the sense of the city as a pole of attraction) jurisdictional outreach. 96 Bertelli, Potere oligarchico, p. 33. The metaphor is cited approvingly by Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 35 and by Pini himself, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 79, who is perfectly aware of the obstacle that episcopal and feudal territories presented. 97 A. Zorzi, Lo stato territoriale ﬁorentino (secoli XIV-XV): aspetti giu- risdizionali, in «Società e Storia», 50, 1990, pp. 799-825. What was not im- provised, of course, was the violent subjection of Pisa, Pistoia, and Volterra. Cfr. Isaacs, States in Tuscany and Veneto, pp. 299-300. 32 Primo piano topics on which a German historian may hope to bring particular insights to bear.

6. The hinterland as a resource

It is perhaps no accident that the first major study of Italian cities’ provisioning policy was written by a Swiss historian, Hans Conrad Peyer98, for the regulation of the trade in grain (Getreidehandelspolitik) was a topic much studied by German and Swiss scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century, at the very time when monographs on the cities’ territorial policy were being written. However – and this is the point – north of the Alps Getreidehan- delspolitik and Territorialpolitik were never symbiotic, whereas in Italy they undoubtedly were. In Philip Jones’s apodictic words, the cities’ aim was «dictated first by motives of power, to extend, recentralize, and maximize control over local resources, of manpower, money, and produce, and over movement of traffic – but also by sense of right»99. The control of territory to secure food supplies is attested from an early date for the cities of Emilia- Romagna100; in Bologna and Parma, for instance, statutes regulating food provisioning were enacted before the demographic explosion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made such legislation a matter of urgency101. That may be because rural lords in the eleventh century responded to the communes’ initial outreach by obstructing deliveries of grain and blocking roads which led to the city, as has been shown for Piacenza in Lombardy102. There is now broad agreement that a provisioning policy was often intrinsic to the cities’ expansion from the outset103.

98 H.C. Peyer, Zur Getreidepolitik oberitalienischer Städte im 13. Jahrhundert, Universum-Verlag, Vienna 1950. 99 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 360-1. 100 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 20. 101 Bocchi, Campagna, pp. 84, 86. 102 Ivi, p. 65. 103 Cfr. D. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, Longman, London-New York 1978, pp. 61-2; E. Coleman, Cities and communes, in Italy in the Central Middle Ages, ed. D. Abulaﬁa, Oxford U.P., Oxford 2004, p. 43; M. Ginatempo, Gerarchie demiche e sistemi urbani nell’Italia bassomedievale: una discussione, in «Società e Storia», 72, 1996, p. 375. Scott, Italian City-State 33

Yet la politcia annonaria went through distinct phas- es104. The cities of northern Italy were always dependent on grain imports105, though these need not have been from overseas. While Florence, in common with many other cities, shipped wheat from Sicily, Apulia, the kingdom of Naples, or Sardinia106, after the Black Death it covered half its requirements from its frontier regions107; the city’s later territorial outreach up the Arno valley was driven in large part by the need to secure supplies at not too great a distance108. Cities such as Genoa or Pisa, with relatively small contadi, were particularly dependent on imports – but that then raises the question whether a contado was necessary to secure food supplies in the ﬁrst place. Much of the rivalry between Genoa and Pisa stemmed from conﬂicts in the Tyrrhenian Sea over grain exports from Sardinia and Corsica, their «displaced» contadi109. Per- manent military campaigns in thirteenth-century Italy, however, meant that cities could not rely on long-distance imports, so that an increase in local productivity became imperative110, which implied some measure of territorial control. That could not be achieved simply by recourse to compulsory market deliveries (Marktzwang), which became commonplace after 1200111, since these could rap-

104 H. Keller, Veränderungen des bäuerlichen Wirtschaftens und Lebens in Oberitalien während des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Bevölkerungswachs- tum und Gesellschaftsorganisation im europäischen Hochmittelalter, in «Frühmittelalterliche Studien», 25, 1991, p. 357. 105 L. Martines, Power and Imagination. City-States in Renaissance Italy, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1983, p. 222. 106 D. Abulafia, The Two Italies. Economic Relations between the Nor- man Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1977, p. 217; Id., Southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia in the medieval Mediterranean economy, in Id., Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean, 1100-1500, Variorum, Aldershot-Brookfield VT 1995, p. 6; J. Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, Longman, London-New York 1980, p. 214. 107 C.M. de la Roncière, L’approvisionnement des villes italiennes au Moyen Âge (XIVe-XVe siècles), in L’Approvisionnnement des villes de l’Eu- rope occidentale au Moyen Âge et aux Temps modernes, in «Flaran», 5, 1985, p. 38. 108 Zorzi, Organisation, p. 228; Peyer, Getreidepolitik, p. 90. 109 According to Abulafia, Two Italies, p. 51 the Pisan contado was quite inadequate for the city’s needs by the late 13th century, but de la Roncière, L’approvisionnement, p. 37 argues that in normal years it sufficed. Peyer believes that Genoa was heavily dependent on grain supplies from the main- land, rather than overseas. Id., Getreidepolitik, p. 65. 110 Keller, Veränderungen, p. 353. 111 Larner, Italy, p. 215. 34 Primo piano idly degenerate into beggar-my-neighbour, as larger cities sucked smaller ones dry. Venice, for instance, which dominated the grain provisioning of the Po delta by means of Marktzwang, between 1230 and 1240 foisted mercantile treaties upon Ferrara which led to the latter’s economic decline112. In the longer term, however, Trevor Dean has modified this unduly stark view113. Rather, the task of land clearing and improvement, a pan-European phenomenon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, assumed a special character in northern Italy, above all in the Po valley, which involved drainage and irrigation (bonificamento) or embankment (arginamento) of marshy lands in the Po’s flood plain114, as well as the opposite measure of canalizing watercourses to improve transport, especially for those cities which were located where tributaries debouched into the Po115. There is indeed some dispute whether canals served primarily to facilitate transport or to irrigate fields in order to boost cereal production. The short answer is that at varying times and places they fulfilled both functions, allowing production to rise and enabling it to reach outlets beyond the immediate growing area116. One example is Padua, whose villagers in the contado were charged with exca- vating a total of 590 canals, stretching over 1100 kms, the larger ones as waterways provided with towpaths to en- able goods haulage, the smaller ones as drainage channels (scoli) to draw off water from marshy land117. This enter-

112 Bocchi, Campagna, pp. 81-2; Larner, Italy, p. 215. 113 T. Dean, Venetian economic hegemony: The case of Ferrara, 1220- 1500, in «Studi Veneziani», n. s. 12, 1986, pp. 45-98. 114 Jones, Medieval agrarian society, pp. 357, 359. For early rivalry between Milan and Lodi over fluvial arteries cfr. L. Frangioni, Milano e le sue strade. Corsi di trasporto e vie di commercio dei prodotti milanesi alla fine del Trecento, Cappelli, Bologna 1983, pp. 25-7; A. Haverkamp, Das Zentra- litätsgefüge Mailands im hohen Mittelalter, in Id., Verfassung, Kultur, Le- bensform. Beiträge zur italienischen, deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte im europäischen Mittelalter, eds. F. Burgard, A. Heit and M. Matheus, Philipp von Zabern, Magonza-Treviri 1997, pp. 198-200. 115 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, pp. 20-1; G. Rippe, Padoue et son contado (Xe-XIIIe siècles). Société et pouvoirs, École Française de Rome, Roma 2003, pp. 514, 517-19, 522, 525, 696-7; F. Menant, Campagnes lombardes du Moyen Âge. L’économie et la société rurale dans la région de Ber- game, de Crémone e de Brescia du Xe au XIIIe siècle, École Française de Rome, Roma 1993, pp. 172-99. 116 De la Roncière, L’approvisionnement, p. 40. 117 B.G. Kohl, Padua under the Carrara, 1318-1405, Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore MD-London 1998, p. 14. Scott, Italian City-State 35 prise required considerable organization and investment, in which cities took the leading part (though convents and bishops were also active as improvers)118. But in a particularly well-known instance at the end of the twelfth century from the Veronese, a podestà from Milan promoted the drainage of land to the south-east of Verona, which was then divided into four hundred parcels of sufficient size to support a peasant household; these were then allocated to citizens with enough capital to take forward the work of improvement, so that the plots could ultimately be leased to peasant farmers119. As a result, yields increased from a ratio of 1:3 initially to 1:6 or even higher by the early fourteenth century, making it possible for communes to compel peasants in their contadi to deliver as much as three-quarters of their harvest to the urban market, confi- dent that they would retain a subsistence surplus, while at the same time prohibiting exports120. This policy not only tied the countryside and the rural economy inextricably to the cities’ interests in a manner which can without hesitation be called mercantilist121; it continued in western Lombardy into the Visconti era after 1400122. Moreover, it rested upon the ownership and exploitation of land (and water), rather than upon jurisdictional rights. Whether that amounted to «exploitation» in the pejorative sense is a moot point123, but at all events it bound city and contado

118 A. Castagnetti, La pianura veronese nel Medioevo. La conquista del suolo e la regolamentazione delle acque, in Una città e il suo fiume. Verona e l’Adige, a cura di G. Borelli, Banca popolare di Verona, Verona 1977, t. I, pp. 58, 60, 76-7, 80; Racine, Plaisance, p. 598; cfr. Id., Poteri medievali e percorsi fluviali nell’Italia padana, in «Quaderni Storici», 61, 1986, pp. 9-32; G. Andenna, Le strutture sociali in età signorile e feudale, in Lombardia, pp. 191-2. 119 A. Castagnetti, Primi aspetti di politica annonaria nell’Italia comunale. La bonifica della ‘palus comunis Veronae’ (1194-99), in «Studi Medie- vali», s. III, 15, 1974, pp. 363-4, 367, 375, 380, 387, 399, 411; Id., Le comunità rurali, in Storia della società italiana, t. VI: La società comunale e il policen- trismo, a cura di A. Benvenuti, Teti, Milano 1986, p. 316; de la Roncière, L’approvisionnement, p. 36; Bortolami, Borghi franchi, p. 32; Keller, Verän- derungen, pp. 353-4. 120 Ivi, pp. 354-5. 121 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 487-8. 122 B. Pullan, A History of Early Renaissance Italy from the Mid-Thir- teenth to the Mid-Fifteenth Century, Allen Lane Penguin Books, London 1973, p. 211. 123 Pini sees cities as exploiters of their hinterlands (which he regards as a source of political weakness, inasmuch as it set the countryside against the city), but concedes that at least in the first phase of bonificamento the cities (or their agents) acted as improvers; the exploitation, when it came – in the 36 Primo piano together in a way which was uncommon in central Italy except for the Lower Arno valley124. Siena, for instance, all but abandoned the low-lying areas of the Maremma once silting had led to marshes and the spread of malaria125. The only parallels are to be found north of the Alps in the dyking and poldering undertaken by the Flemish cities. And, as in Flanders, the measures could lead to serious conflict between neighbouring cities over the diversion of waterways and the blocking of access to the sea – one thinks of the running tensions between Bruges and Gh- ent126 – which in the Italian context have been described by John Larner as «hydraulic wars»127.

7. Urban landholding

For the German and Swiss cities (though not for the Flemish) the acquisition by citizens of property rights and revenues in the countryside has customarily been seen as the ﬁrst stage of urban territorial expansion; later, cities acquired lands and subjects collectively, often using their charitable foundations, such as hospitals, as stalking-

late thirteenth century – was essentially fiscal. Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, pp. 21, 41, 81, 104. The drainage of the valley bottoms did allow new roads to be constructed, though this did not constitute Johan Plesner’s «road revolution». Larner, Italy, p. 163. 124 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 488. 125 Up to the late thirteenth century the Maremma around Grosseto had been fertile, well-drained, and free of disease. M. Borracelli, Lo sviluppo economico di Grosseto e della Maremma nei secoli XII e XIII nell’ambito dell’area senese, in Siena e Maremma nel Medioevo, a cura di M. Ascheri, Betti, Siena 2001, p. 139. Rather than tackling the problem of marshes, after the collapse of the rule of the Nine the Siena magistracy «sfruttò le poche risorse rimaste», ivi, p. 155 n. 150. The city turned its attention instead to the hills, with sheep-farming, and iron-ore mining on the Monte Amiata. Cfr. G. Piccinni, Economy and society in southern Tuscany in the late Mid- dle Ages, in The ‘Other Tuscany’: Essays in the History of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena during the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, eds. T. W. Blomquist and M.F. Mazzaoui, Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 1994, pp. 218, 221, 223 sgg. 126 D. Nicholas, The Scheldt trade and the ‘Ghent War’ of 1379-1385, in «Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire», 144, 1978, pp. 189-359; W.P. Blockmans, The impact of cities on state formation: three contrasting territories in the Low Countries, 1300-1500, in Resistance, Representation, and Community, p. 266, where the conflict between Bruges and Ghent is described as «insoluble». 127 Larner, Italy, p. 215. Scott, Italian City-State 37 horses128. Although urban landholding is rightly seen as a crucial aspect of town-country relations129, there was no necessary or automatic connection between rural property-holding and the construction of a territory, as the example of Augsburg clearly demonstrates: its international merchants and bankers, such as the Fuggers and Welsers, became feudal landlords on a vast scale in Swabia; the ra- dius of bourgeois property extended to 40 kms or even 60 kms; yet the city itself remained entirely bereft of a contado. And even where there was a connection it was by no means straightforward, as the example of Ulm’s territory shows, where the geographical discrepancy between the location of citizens’ estates and the city’s subsequent territorial outreach was very striking130. Moreover, where individual citizens acquired their rural estates as fiefs from noble landowners, they might be called upon by their feudal superiors to render military service in campaigns against their own cities, as happened in the First Mar- grave’s War between Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg and the city of Nuremberg between 1449 and 1452131. In Italy, as far as I can see, the motives which lay behind the acquisition of landed estates have been insuf- ficiently conceptualized – perhaps because so many citizens were already landowners – or rather, they have been dominated by an obsession with sharecropping, especially from the fourteenth century onwards, with its rise on large, consolidated farms, the so-called mezzadria poderale, and the consequent erosion of free peasant

128 T. Scott, Town and country in Germany, 1350-1600, in Town and Country in Europe, 1300-1800, ed. S.R. Epstein, Cambridge U.P., Cam- bridge 2001, pp. 204-5 (expanded repr. in Id., Town, Country, and Regions in Reformation Germany, Brill, Leiden-Boston MA 2005, pp. 225, 230); Kießling, Umlandgefüge, pp. 36-7. 129 Id., Bürgerlicher Besitz auf dem Land – ein Schlüssel zu den Stadt- Land-Beziehungen im Spätmittelalter, aufgezeigt am Beispiel Augsburgs und anderer ostschwäbischer Städte, in Bayerisch-schwäbische Landesgeschichte an der Universität Augsburg 1975-1977. Vorträge, Aufsätze, Berichte, ed. P. Fried, Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1979, pp. 121-40; Id., Herrschaft – Markt – Landbesitz. Aspekte der Zentralität und der Stadt-Land-Beziehungen spätmittelalterlicher Städte an ostschwäbischen Beispielen, in Zentralität als Problem der mittelalterlichen Stadtgeschichtsforschung, ed. E. Meynen, Böhlau, Köln-Vienna 1979, pp. 180-218. 130 Scott, City-State, pp. 17-25, 52. 131 K.-F. Krüger, Bürgerlicher Landbesitz im Spätmittelalter. Das Bei- spiel der Reichsstadt Nürnberg, in Städtisches Um- und Hinterland, p. 96; Scott, City-State, pp. 51-2. 38 Primo piano tenancies and the destruction of village communities132. This is an issue of central importance in Italian historiography, but it will be bracketed here, since sharecropping was of marginal relevance in the German-speaking lands. In Italy we may distinguish between three patterns of individual citizens’ landholding, though they undoubtedly shade into each other. Mercantile families might seek to control the contado as a source of raw materials or as a market area for urban goods, as well as an investment and safeguard against business risks133. Equally, Italian merchant aristocrats might reinvent themselves as aristocratic merchants – the turn of phrase is, needless to say, Philip Jones’s134 – by acquiring feudal titles, castles, and landed estates, and the prestige and status that went with them135. That did not preclude them from engaging also in agrarian improvement by, for instance, laying out formal gardens or planting woodlands, though land was there- by lost for cereal cultivation136. Giovanni Cherubini has further observed that what he terms the grande amore of citizens for rural property, quite apart from motives of investment or social prestige, manifested itself even when better returns could have been obtained from investment in trade, and stemmed ultimately from the need for security of food supplies in a society structurally exposed to the threat of dearth137. None of this was peculiar to Italy, but a third pattern certainly was, whereby immigrants to

132 Cfr. the essays in Contadini e proprietari nella Toscana moderna. Atti del Convegno di studi in onore di Giorgio Giorgetti, t. I: Dal Medioevo all’età moderna, Olschki, Firenze 1979. Fundamental also is G. Piccinni, Mezzadria e potere politico. Suggestioni dell’età moderna e contemporanea e realtà medievale, in «Studi Storici», 46, 2005, pp. 323-43. 133 Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 60; Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 78; G. Pinto, Città e spazi economici nell’Italia comunale, CLUEB, Bologna 1996, pp. 139-40: Luca da Sera, the business partner of the famous merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, advised the latter «comprare le posi- sioni… che almeno quelle non coverano rischio di mare, né di fattori, né di compagni, né di faliti». 134 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 105. 135 Pinto, Città e spazi economici, pp. 145, 152; Id., Rapporti economici, p. 19; P.J. Jones, Florentine families and Florentine diaries in the fourteenth century, in Studies in Italian Medieval History presented to Miss E. M. Jami- son, eds. P. Grierson and J. Ward-Perkins, British School at Rome, London 1956, pp. 199-200, who points out that castles were often remodelled as villas. 136 Pinto, Città e spazi economici, pp. 134-5. 137 G. Cherubini, L’espropriazione contadina e la distribuzione della proprietà fondaria nel Centro-nord, in Comuni e signorie, p. 350; Id., La mezzadria toscana delle origini, in Contadini e proprietari, pp. 143-4. Scott, Italian City-State 39 cities retained ties to their rural roots and might spend part of the year on their family farms138. These were not powerful aristocrats, but smaller landowners, rich peasants, businessmen, notaries, or knights139. The family farm contributed towards their self-sufficiency in food, and it remained an attractive security for those who were not wealthy enough to risk investing in the cities’ public debt, despite its often lucrative returns140. None of these patterns had much bearing on cities’ deliberate and collective construction of a contado. Chronologically, the relationship is if anything the reverse: with the consolidation of the contado – the city’s jurisdictional supremacy over its territory – citizens now had every incentive to buy land, secure in the knowledge that they had the full legal protection of the city’s statutes and immunities. The famous Florentine catasto of 1427, for instance, reveals that citizens by then owned two-thirds of the contado, with the peasants reduced to a mere 18%141. In reality, the peasants’ predicament was even more dire, since citizens were exempt from taxation on their rural estates, so that the collective fiscal burden on rural communes fell dis- proportionately on the remaining smallholders. Rural indebtedness by the fifteenth century (or even earlier)142 was a pervasive feature of northern Italy and fully deserves the epithet of «exploitation» – but it was an indirect, not a direct, consequence of the cities’ territory-building143. We need instead to turn to the cities’ corporate acquisition of rural estates, specifically to their efforts to bring the landed nobility to heel. A simple progression has been proposed by Daniel Waley, who argues that in the early stages of cities’ collective contado expansion they obliged

138 Coleman, Italian communes, p. 390; Waley, Italian City-Republics, p. 64; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 104; Hyde, Society and Politics, p. 81; F. Bocchi, Città e campagne nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (secc. XII- XIV), in «Storia della Città», 36, 1986, p. 103. Bocchi quotes Giovanni Vil- lani’s chronicle of Florence in 1338, though the latter refers to «la maggior parte de’ richi e nobili e agiati cittadini», rather than to the middling sort of citizen. 139 Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 23. 140 Pinto, Città e spazi economici, p. 129. 141 Ivi, p. 126. 142 P. Grillo, Milano in età comunale (1183-1276). Istituzioni, società, economia, Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, Spoleto 2001, p. 162 traces rural indebtedness as far back as the late 11th century as the result of the extension of bourgeois landownership. 143 Cfr. Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 107. 40 Primo piano the rural feudal lords to swear fealty without compromis- ing their landlordship. Later, in the thirteenth century, communes began to buy out the rural nobility, not only acquiring their fiefs but subjecting their peasants directly to the city144. That pattern was common enough, but it needs to be nuanced. Aside from communes acquiring allodial lands which had known no feudal superior, the expropriation of the early thirteenth century had been preceded in some instances by a policy of «surrender and regrant» (to use the term applied to sixteenth-century Ire- land) as Riccardo Rao has shown for Vercelli and Franc- esco Panero for Alba145. Equally, cities might buttress outright purchases by advancing loans or sureties to secure jurisdictional rights, as Varanini has traced for Verona146. Nevertheless, a direct, deliberate, and continuous strategy of territorial expansion is hard to discern, with occasion- al exceptions such as Brescia147. While there may be no doubting the general observation of Chittolini that urban property holding went hand-in-hand with greater political control148, the prevalence of indirect dominion through the estates of hospitals and convents, so typical of cities north of the Alps, which we also find in Milan, Brescia, Lucca149, or Siena (whose hospital was the largest contado landholder in the early fourteenth century)150, should remind us that for the cities’ ruling merchant classes the hinterland in the first instance was an object of commercial domination and capital investment, rather than territorial ownership and jurisdiction, with which the cities

144 Waley, Italian City-Republics, pp. 59-60. 145 R. Rao, Proprietà allodiale civica e formazione del distretto urbano nella fondazione dei borghi nuovi vercellesi (prima metà del XIII secolo), in Borghi nuovi, pp. 359, 364; F. Panero, Comuni e borghi franchi nel Piemonte medievale, CLUEB, Bologna 1988, sezione 2: Una città e il suo territorio: il comune di Alba nei secoli XII-XV, p. 138. The term in Italian is feudo oblato; cfr. Milani, Comuni italiani, p. 33. 146 Varanini, Processi di organizzazione, p. 219. 147 R. Rao, Beni comunali e governo del territorio nel Liber Potheris di Brescia, in Contado e città in dialogo. Comuni urbani e comunità rurali nella Lombardia medievale, a cura di L. Chiappa Mauri, Cisalpino-Monduzzi, Milano 2003, pp. 173, 180-1. He notes that political control of its territory remained more important to Brescia than economic return, ivi, p. 196. 148 G. Chittolini, La crisi delle libertà comunali e le origini dello Stato territoriale, in Id., Formazione dello Stato regionale, p. 43. 149 Pinto, Rapporti economici, p. 15. 150 Isaacs, States in Tuscany and Veneto, p. 299. Scott, Italian City-State 41 collectively were more immediately concerned151. The distinction in purpose and practice between individual landholding and collective territorial sovereignty has also been stressed by Sergio Bertelli152. The point has been tellingly illustrated for Lombardy from a slightly different perspective by Elisa Occhipinti, who describes Piacen- za’s variable strategy towards the powerful marquises of Malaspina. The city entered into protective alliances with them; it practised «surrender and regrant», or in some cases bought their estates outright where they lay along vital lines of communication to the Ligurian coast153: axial commercial routes, not radial market networks, here dictated territorial policy.

8. Citizenship in the contado

For historians of the Low Countries, Germany, and Switzerland the cities’ territorial policy rested upon twin pillars: control of land, whether through direct ownership or the exercise of jurisdictional overlordship, and the extension of citizen’s rights to countrydwellers. However, the institution of rural citizenship – outburgher is my suggested English neologism for the German Ausbürger or the Dutch buitenpoorter – might serve widely differ- ing ends. In Flanders, the larger cities offered citizenship to peasants as an explicit inducement not to emigrate to already hypertrophic communes: that applies to the so- called drie steden of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres154. But smaller towns, too, acquired outburghers, often with the

151 Cfr. Pullan, Early Renaissance Italy, pp. 112-3. That did not preclude cities collectively acquiring and controlling strategic economic resources such as quarries, mines, hydraulic works, and the like. Pinto, Rapporti economici, p. 25, though he points out that this is a neglected topic in Italian historical scholarship. 152 Bertelli, Potere oligarchico, p. 30. 153 E. Occhipinti, Territorio e viabilità: l’azione del comune di Piacenza nel secolo XII, in Studi sull’Emilia occidentale nel Medioevo: società e istituzioni, a cura di R. Greci, CLUEB, Bologna 2001, pp. 162-3, 167; P. Grillo, Vie di comunicazione, trafﬁci e mercati nella politica intercittadina milanese fra XII e XIII secolo, in «Archivio Storico Italiano», 159, 2001, p. 66; Ra- cine, Plaisance, pp. 277, 280-1. Subsequently Piacenza took action against marquis Oberto Pallavicini to gain control of the Val Taro, ivi, p. 283. 154 D. Nicholas, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic, and Politi- cal Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders, De Tempel, Bruges 1971, pp. 220-1, 238. 42 Primo piano tacit encouragement of the counts of Flanders, as a deliberate counterweight to the military power and economic clout of the drie steden themselves155. In Germany, treaties of outburghership were concluded with the surrounding nobility in order to weaken their potential to harm the cities’ interests, either economically by blocking supplies of foodstuffs and raw materials to urban markets, or politically by combining in military alliances against the cities or by individual feuds. A positive charge was given to such agreements by the requirement that feudal lords should render military service to cities in times of need and open their castles to civic militia garrisons156. These compacts, known as Burgrechte, became an essential building-block of the Swiss cities’ territorial expansion. But alongside nobles commoners, too, could obtain rights of citizenship, a practice much more widespread in Germany than traditional historiography has allowed157. These citizens, sometimes called paleburghers (Pfahlbürger) rather than outburghers, were found in the hinterlands of many south German cities, and not just those of the imperial and free cities, though ultimately urban magistrates seem to have found such paleburghers more trouble than they were worth. Yet in Switzerland the emancipation of entire rural communes from serfdom through the collective purchase of outburghership was a hallmark of civic territory-building in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, with Bern, Luzern, and Zürich to the fore158. In recent years, however, revisionism has been at work. The very variety of functions which rural citizenship north of the Alps could perform has prompted Guy Marchal to denounce it as a «complete irrelevance to the territorial or hinterland policy of cities»159. Burgrechte,

155 P. Stabel, Dwarfs among Giants. The Flemish Urban Network in the Late Middle Ages, Garant, Louvain-Apeldoorn 1997, pp. 95-9. 156 R. Kießling, Umlandpolitik im Spiegel städtischer Einbürgerungen während des späten Mittelalters, in Neubürger im späten Mittelalter. Migra- tion und Austausch in der Städtelandschaft des alten Reiches (1250-1550), ed. R.C. Schwinges, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2002, pp. 303-8. 157 Scott, City-State, p. 61; Id., Freiburg and the Breisgau. Town-Coun- try Relations in the Age of Reformation and Peasants’ War, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1986. 158 Id., Liberty and community in medieval Switzerland, in «German History», 13, 1995, pp. 110-1 (with detailed references). 159 G.P. Marchal, Pfahlbürger, bourgeois forains, buitenpoorters, bourgeois du roi: Aspekte einer zweideutigen Rechtsstellung, in Neubürger, pp. 333-67. Scott, Italian City-State 43 on the other hand, were indeed crucial; in this regard he contrasts Luzern’s outburgher policy unfavourably with Bern and Zürich’s active pursuit of Burgrecht treaties with the nobility160. This debate has yet to run its course, but beyond Switzerland Marchal has certainly overplayed his hand. Given that the German City-States were not so much areal territories as personal or corporate associa- tions, the role of outburghership in all its manifestations – especially where it served as the speciﬁc substitute for landed acquisitions – may be accorded its due weight in the cities’ assertion of control over their hinterlands161. Italy offers both striking similarities and glaring differences. Given the unique social and political composi- tion of the elites of the central and northern Italian cities, memorably described by Philip Jones as a «feudo-bour- geoisie», it comes as no surprise that they were at pains from the onset of the communal era to reach an accom- modation with the surrounding feudal nobility162, about which, strangely, De Vergottini has almost nothing to say. The most characteristic form of such agreements was the patto di cittadinatico, whereby citizenship was coupled with the obligation to reside for part of the year in the city and to open castles to civic garrisons, known in Latin as sequimentum163. These treaties were, in both purpose and practice, the exact equivalent of the Burgrechte which later became commonplace north of the Alps. From Bo- logna, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, to Modena, to cite only instances from northern Italy, such compacts were wide- spread164. but they were not universal, being common

160 Id., Sempach 1386. Von den Anfängen des Territorialstaates Luzern. Beiträge zur Frühgeschichte des Kantons Luzern, Helbing & Lichtenhahn, Basel 1986, pp. 177-82. 161 Scott, City-State, p. 62. For Flanders cfr. the verdict on Ghent of J. Decavele, De Gentse poorterij en buitenpoorterij, in Recht en Instellingen in de oude Nederlanden tijdens de Middeleeuwen en de nieuwe tijd. Liber amicorum Jan Buntinx, Louvain U.P., Louvain 1981, p. 66: «De buitenpoorterij was dus voor Gent één van de middelen om invloed te verwerven in een zoruim mogelik hinterland, en het is dan ook logisch dat in revolutionaire perioden het buitenpoorterschap telkens zijn grootste uitbreidig kende». 162 Coleman, Cities and communes, p. 50; Larner, Italy, pp. 87-8. 163 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, pp. 79, 80-1; P. Brezzi, Le relazio- ni tra la città e il contado nei comuni italiani, in «Quaderni Catanesi di Studi Classici e Medievali», 5, 1983, p. 211. The term in German is Öffnungsrecht, in French jurableté et redableté. There is no English translation for in Eng- land the institution was unknown. 164 Bocchi, Campagna, p. 69. Nobles could swear oaths of loyalty to more than one city, however! Ivi, p. 70. That applied to the feudo oblato as 44 Primo piano in Emilia, Piedmont, parts of Romagna and Lombardy yet rare in the eastern Po valley (in Verona165) or in the Veneto, aside from Treviso166. They were flanked, moreover, by other forms of comitatinanza which might on occasion involve cities imposing such treaties by force of arms167: that quintessentially south German device of Burgenbruch was deployed as early as the twelfth century in northern Italy to sever the connection between castles and the exercise of public jurisdiction by razing them to the ground168. Yet in general the attraction was mutual: rural lords might actively seek citizenship as a result of impoverish- ment or in order to escape the clutches of imperial or papal authority169. Some nobles, nevertheless, chose to keep their distance, especially the remoter ones, but others retired to the countryside whilst retaining their citizen- ship170. These cives silvestres (or forenses), described by Jones as a «marginal and equivocal class»171, became a running sore of grievance between cities and their countrysides, not least because most cities insisted that such rural citizens should under no circumstances be taxed with the contadini172. Whatever legal resemblance there may have been between Pfahlbürger or buitenpoorters and cives well: the marquises of Malaspina had sworn both to Piacenza and to Genoa. Milani, Comuni italiani, p. 33. 165 Varanini, Processi di organizzazione, p. 222. Verona was not faced with an entrenched rural nobility. 166 G.M. Varanini, Die Organisation des städtischen Bezirks in der Poe- bene im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Mark Treviso, Lombardei, Emilia), in Hochmittelalterliche Territorialstrukturen, p. 107. For Piedmont cfr. A.M. Nada Patrone, Il Piemonte medievale, in Il Piemonte e la Liguria, pp. 20-1. 167 Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 24. 168 As in late twelfth-century Padua: Varanini, Processi di organizzazione, p. 220; Id., Organisation des städtischen Bezirks, p. 101. 169 Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 115. 170 Larner, Italy, p. 90; Bocchi, Città e campagne, p. 102; Jones, Italian City-State, p. 299. 171 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 564. Or, to quote Chittolini: «una vicenda tanto più odiosa se, a beneficiare dell’immunità, erano addirittura persone della comunità, che avessero ottenuto il diritto di cittadinanza, pur continuando a vivere nel contado: i cosiddetti cives forenses», G. Chittoli- ni, I capitoli di dedizione delle comunità lombarde a Francesco Sforza, in Id., Città, comunità e feudi negli Stati dell’Italia centro-settentrionale (secoli XIV-XVI), Unicopli, Milano 1996, p. 45. 172 Ivi, p. 53. Even in the 16th century Brescia had numerous cives forenses who evaded rural taxation: this spurred the development of rural Es- tates, whose primary task was to petition against the practice. A. Rossini, Le campagne bresciane nel Cinquecento. Territorio, fisco, società, Franco Angeli, Milano 1994, pp. 290-1. Scott, Italian City-State 45 silvestres, the similarity was in form only: the cives silvestres in Italy essentially constituted a fiscal category173. To take one telling example: the inhabitants of Borgo San Donnino (the modern Fidenza) in the mid-fifteenth century stripped the roofs off houses belonging to Parmese citizens who refused to shoulder their share of taxation174. The rural communes went to great lengths (usually without much success) either to expel or to absorb these cuck- oos in the nest175. But in the case of Siena, a city whose merchants were also significant landholders, the sting was drawn from the cives forenses, not by obliging them to pay tax in the countryside, but by exempting the rural communes from making good the fiscal shortfall, calculated at one-sixth of Siena’s contado revenues!176 These cives silvestres, of course, are quite distinct from peasant outburghers or paleburghers, a category of citizens which in Italy seems to be virtually unknown. In view of the universal citizenship of ancient Rome (apart from slaves) which informed the Italian cities’ historical consciousness and self-perception that might appear quite bizarre, until it is recalled how profoundly ideological comitatinanza was. Ultimately the cities invoked the familiar anthropomorphic metaphor of head and members, or of «mother-city and rural sons», elaborated by Roman- law jurists and notaries, though initially they had been content to require obedience to the cities’ «honour»177. The Italian cities accordingly showed extreme reluctance to grant citizenship to any countrydwellers who were not nobles. If it was conferred, then almost always upon ru-

173 M. Berengo, L’Europa delle città. Il volto della società urbana euro- pea tra Medioevo ed Età moderna, Einaudi, Torino 1999, pp. 153-4. 174 G. Chittolini, Le ‘terre separate’ nel ducato di Milano in età sforze- sca, in Id., Città, comunità e feudi, p. 78, n. 66. 175 Cfr. M. Berengo, Città e ‘contado’ in Italia dal XV al XVIII secolo, in «Storia della Città», 36, 1986, p. 109. 176 W.M. Bowsky, Cives silvestres: Sylvan citizenship and the Sienese commune (1287-1355), in «Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria», 72, 1965, pp. 66-7. The city also allowed – in a foretaste of the practice which was to become widespread in the sixteenth century, as in the case of Brescia – the rural communes to submit petitions of redress at outburghers’ tax evasion. Ivi, p. 68. By contrast, small farmers (especially those who hired their labour out) who acquired such citizenship were required to remain on the land as an agricultural labour force and to pay tax there. G. Piccinni, I ‘villani incit- tadinati’ nella Siena del XIV secolo, in «Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria», 82/83, 1975/76, pp. 189-90. 177 De Vergottini, Origini (1977), pp. 64-5, 71-2; Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 78; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 132. 46 Primo piano ral communities or dependent small towns, rather than on individuals. Collective oaths of citizenship can already be found in the consular era, but the rural communes involved did not enjoy full citizen’s rights or become part of the Bürgerverband, as it is termed in German, that is, the city as a corporate community178. Under popolo regimes of the thirteenth century the restrictions were eased; the governments of Asti, Modena, Pistoia, and Chieri extended citizenship to their rural communes, and Padua, Pisa, and Treviso to their subject towns179. Siena, too, conferred such rights collectively on a string of strategically sig- niﬁcant communes before 1350180. After the Black Death there was a fresh incentive to secure the loyalty of dependent communes: Florence conferred its citizen’s rights collectively on Cortona, Prato, San Miniato, and San Gimignano, in the latter case to city and contado alike181. Grants to individuals did occur182, but usually to the «better class» of countrydweller, and then only most infre- quently. As early as the thirteenth century, for instance, Siena had allowed peasant families to send one in four (and later one in two) males to the city, provided that the remainder stayed behind in domo et super podere to work the land183. There are isolated instances of citizenship being sold as a revenue-raising device (Bologna in 1315184), or of it being conferred as a reward for loyalty in a crisis. In 1499, in a famous instance, the magistrates of Pisa, in

178 Dilcher, Entstehung, p. 146. 179 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 564, 570. 180 Redon, Espace d’une cité, p. 226. 181 Chittolini, The Italian City-State, p. 594; J. Kirshner, Paolo di Cas- tro on ‘Cives ex Privilegio’: a controversy over the legal qualification for public office in early fifteenth-century Florence, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, eds. A. Molho and J.A. Tedeschi, Northern Illinois U.P., Dekalb, IL 1971, pp. 229, 234-5. Before the Black Death Carmignano and Montecatini had been granted some citizen’s rights as veri cives, but their inhabitants’ status was not that of original Florentine citizens and they were not eligible for public office. Ivi, p. 236. 182 Cfr. Berengo, Città e ‘contado’, p. 122. 183 Pinto, Città e spazi economici, p. 55; P. Cammaronsano, Le campagne senese dalla fine del secolo XII agli inizi del Trecento: dinamica interna e forme del dominio cittadino, in Contadini e proprietari, pp. 161-2. 184 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 150. In Pisa, grants of outburghership were designed, not to encourage immigration, but to identify applicants’ place of residence, in town or country, the better to be able to tax them. In Emilio Cristiani’s words «allo scopo di sottoporli in modo efficien- te agli accertamenti fiscali», E. Cristiani, Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa dalle origini del podestariato alla signoria del Donoratico, Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, Napoli 1962, p. 180. Scott, Italian City-State 47 return for their support during Florence’s siege of the city, offered to place its contadini on the same fiscal footing as the oppidans and to extend citizenship to them, but only to those who were prepared to move to the city185. Yet the issue cannot so easily be brushed aside, as Ivana Pederzani’s researches on Bergamo show. In both valley and plain the numerous cives ex civitate posed a persistent and pernicious problem for the city, both before and after its submission to Venice in 1428. Grants of citizenship to countrydwellers to replenish the urban population had required them, as elsewhere, to move to the city, but many then returned to the land. While some belonged to the rural elite, others did not. As Bergamo informed Venice: aliqui sunt nobiles, aliqui divites et aliqui pauperes laboratores et intendentes laborerio agricolturae et viventes sicut agricoltores et laboratores terrarum…186. If the rural communities hoped that the fiscal (and later military) ex- emption of these citizens stubbornly resident in the countryside would be cancelled, they were to be disappointed: Venice barely lifted a finger to redress the fiscal imbalance; only in 1448 did it finally agree to rescind the citizenship of those directly engaged in opera ruralia187. In the duchy of Milan, by contrast, rural communes by the fifteenth century had become assertive enough to persuade some cives forenses (in the Val Chiavenna and the Valtellin) to forgo their privileged status and indeed to accept tax as- sessment as countrydwellers188. The failure to deploy paleburghership seems at first glance all the more inexplicable in the light of the widespread manumission of serfs, encouraged above all by po-

185 M. Luzzati, Una guerra di popolo. Lettere private del tempo dell’as- sedio di Pisa (1494-1509), Pacini, Pisa 1973, p. 121; cfr. Chittolini, The Ital- ian City-State, p. 594. 186 I. Pederzani, Venezia e lo ‘Stado de Terraferma’. Il governo delle co- munità nel territorio bergamasco (secc. XV-XVIII), Vita e pensiero, Milano 1992, pp. 64, 69-71; cit. a p. 71. 187 Ivi, pp. 77-81, 88, 91. Even so, the issue remained contentious until the end of the century. Ivi, p. 117. Compare a Pisan statute of 1286 which had provided that citizens originally from the countryside had the right to dwell for three months a year on their estates, on condition that they did not pursue opera rusticana…videlicet arare, seminare, aut vangare sive sappere, secare, trebbiare, carreggiare, portare et sucum traficare. M. Luzzati, Tosca- na senza mezzadria. Il caso pisano alla fine del Medio Evo, in Contadini e proprietari, p. 311 n. 47. 188 A. Gamberini, Principe, comunità e territori nel ducato di Milano: spunti per una rilettura, in «Quaderni Storici», n. s. 127, 2008, p. 254. 48 Primo piano polo regimes in the thirteenth century, since that linkage, after all, was to become the hallmark of the Swiss cities’ territorial policy. A clue lies in the singular action of the Piedmontese commune of Alba in the thirteenth century. In a striking departure from the practice of other north Italian cities, Alba, admittedly a very small city and hence not typical, offered its contadini collective paleburghership in preference to founding new towns in its countryside, whereby the communes were exempted from tolls, customs, and stallage charges at the city’s market189. For the establishment of borghi nuovi, or borghi franchi, was the principal instrument of the Italian cities’ territorial policy from the late twelfth century onwards – and the main inducement to settle in or relocate to these new towns was precisely the prospect of achieving manumission through the acquisition of citizenship. The cities, in other words, did have paleburghers, but under a different sign: they were the inhabitants of the new urban foundations. On occasion, citizen’s rights might even be granted within the dominant city itself, as with the inhabitants of Asti’s new towns in Piedmont190. There is no space here to dwell on the foundation of borghi franchi in detail, a topic which has been among the most controversial in Italian medieval historiogra- phy191. Yet some remarks are required in order to place the policy in its European context. There is no doubt that borghi franchi should be viewed within the framework of Europe-wide demographic growth and economic expansion between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Dur- ing that period new fortresses, villages, semi-urban settlements, and fully-fledged towns were established192. In Italy this process can be seen as the logical continuation of

189 Panero, Comuni e borghi franchi, pp. 139-40, 144. In every case, such grants were accompanied by the buying out of lords’ jurisdictional rights in the communes concerned, ivi, p. 146. 190 R. Bordone, ‘Loci novi’ e ‘villenove’ nella politica territoriale del comune di Asti, in Borghi nuovi, p. 103. A late 13th-century chronicle contrasts these with Asti’s dependent «old towns», whose inhabitants were subjects (homines) of Asti and who paid it an annual fodrum. 191 Cfr. most recently P. Guglielmotti, Villenove e borghi franchi; espe- rienza di ricerca e problemi di metodo, in «Archivio Storico Italiano», 166, 2008, pp. 79-96. 192 A.I. Pini, Il “certiﬁcato di nascita” di un borgo franco strategico bolognese. La lapide di fondazione di Castel San Pietro dell’anno 1200, in Borghi nuovi, p. 153. Scott, Italian City-State 49 the earlier phenomenon of incastellamento193. The work was undertaken by a variety of lay and ecclesiastical lords – rural seigneurs, territorial dynasts, bishops, convents – especially in the more remote mountainous and ger- manophone areas of Italy194, but in central and northern Italy predominantly by the cities themselves. That should dispel any notion that the cities’ motives differed funda- mentally from those of feudal lords – except that a clear anti-seigneurial thrust underpinned the cities’ actions as they sought to curtail the local power and jurisdiction of the rural aristocracy195. The motives behind the foundation of borghi franchi covered a broad spectrum: strategic aims (the secur- ing of commercial transport routes, or the patrolling of frontiers, as the cities’ contadi began to bump up against each other, or the replacement of seigneurial castles)196; economic needs (guaranteeing food supplies, improving land through assarting, drainage, or irrigation)197; demographic ends (a more even or functional distribution of population through the contado, or the encouragement of settlement in hitherto barren and uninhabited areas)198; or simple administrative expediency (the control of a burgeoning territory)199. That these aims frequently overlapped even in one city’s policy has been amply demonstrated for Bologna200. It becomes largely otiose, therefore, to enquire which goal took prece-

193 Provero, Forty years of rural history, pp. 157, 160; Menant, Cam- pagnes lombardes, p. 100 refers to borghi nuovi as «un second incastellamento». 194 Bortolami, Borghi franchi, pp. 20-1. 195 Larner, Italy, p. 91; Jones, Italian City-State, p. 366; Occhipinti, Ita- lia dei comuni, p. 102; Bortolami, Borghi franchi, pp. 20-1. 196 Cfr. Haverkamp, Städte, p. 232; Coleman, Cities and communes, p. 45; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, pp. 105-6. For Cremona cfr. Milani, Co- muni italiani, p. 37. The military-strategic function has most recently been stressed by F. Menant, L’Italie des communes (1100-1350), Belin, Paris 2005, pp. 41-2. 197 Cfr. D. Osheim, Rural Italy, in Italy in the Central Middle Ages, p. 165; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, pp. 105-6. 198 Cfr. Hyde, Society and Politics, p. 77; Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 93; Grillo, Politica territoriale, p. 51. 199 Cfr. Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, pp. 90-1. 200 Id., ‘Certificato di nascita’, pp. 154-7; Id., Classe politica e proget- tualità urbana a Bologna nel XII e XIII secolo, in Strutture del potere ed élites economiche nelle città europee dei secoli XII-XVI, a cura di G. Petti Balbi, Liguori, Napoli 1996, p. 113, where he particularly emphasizes the occupation of empty spaces. 50 Primo piano dence. It should also be stressed, as Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur has done for Perugia, that these aims could be subsumed within a wider territorial policy designed to stem the flow of excessive immigrants to the city201. There are echoes here, albeit under an altered sign, of the outburgher policies of the large Flemish cities. Nevertheless, the dispersion of borghi franchi was un- even. Aldo Settia, for example, has noted the distinction in Lombardy between those founded on the left bank of the river Adda by Cremona, Brescia, or Bergamo, and those on the right bank, where Pavia, Como, and Milan tended to bolster existing settlements by granting them patents of enfranchisement and thenceforth simply dub- bing them borghi («sit burgus»)202. Even where foundations were frequent, the strategies of individual cities might vary: Brescia, the most energetic founder of new towns203, chose to found them in the fertile plain; Ber- gamo preferred the mineral-rich valleys of its pre-alpine hinterland204. In general, in northern Italy borghi franchi were very widespread in Piedmont (where feudal lordships still flourished), rather less common in the Veneto or Emilia205. For his part, Jones has argued that borghi franchi in Lombardy served essentially economic ends, whereas in Piedmont and Tuscany strategic (scilicet anti- feudal) considerations were paramount206. North of the Alps the wave of new urban foundations occurred well before cities were in a position to embark

201 J.-C. Maire Vigueur, Guerres, conquête du contado et transformations de l’habitat en Italie centrale au XIIIe siècle, in Castrum, 3: Guerre, fortification et habitat dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Âge. Colloque organisé par la Casa de Velázquez et l’École Française de Rome, Madrid, 24-27 novembre 1985, ed. A. Bazzana, Casa de Velázquez/École Française de Rome, Madrid-Paris 1988, p. 278. 202 A.A. Settia, Epilogo, in Borghi nuovi, pp. 437-8; cfr. Grillo, Politica territoriale, p. 45. 203 G. Andenna, Territorio e popolazione, in Lombardia, p. 37. It had founded around 20 borghi nuovi by the early 13th century. 204 Menant, Campagnes lombardes, pp. 69-83. 205 Varanini, Processi di organizzazione, p. 219; Id., Organizzazione del territorio, p. 165; Id., Organisation des städtischen Bezirks, p. 106, n. 25. 206 Jones, Medieval agrarian society, p. 357. In Piedmont, the territorial policy of cities such as Asti, Alba, and Vercelli was shaped by competition with feudal seigneurs for control of a sparsely inhabited region. Varanini, Organisation des städtischen Bezirks, p. 106, n. 25. For the elision of strategic-defensive aims with commercial ones in the case of Mantua cfr. M. Vaini, Dal comune alla signoria. Mantova dal 1200 al 1328, Franco Angeli, Milano 1986, pp. 139-40, 142. Scott, Italian City-State 51 upon a territorial policy. But when they did, it is striking that they rarely contemplated creating new dependent urban settlements. Indeed, few City-States in Germany or Switzerland had subordinate towns of any significance within their territorial boundaries. (Flanders is another matter: the area of influence of the drie steden, although never consolidated into territorial statehood, encompassed a profusion of small towns)207. Foundations of new towns in Germany and Switzerland on the part of local lay and ecclesiastical lords were often speculative, as they strove to shore up their position in the face of encroaching territorial princes by battening on to the fiscal and economic potential of urban settlements. The princes themselves could, of course, deploy the same tactic as a deliberate weapon of state-building: one thinks of the dukes of Zähringen with their foundations of Freiburg im Breisgau, Fribourg, or Bern208. In the case of the local lords, however, this tactic frequently fell foul of the doctrine of competing goods, as rival settlements were established at strategic crossroads – commanding the entry to mountain passes, or facing each other on opposite banks of a navigable river. No wonder that so many new towns subsequently disappeared, western Switzerland being a classic instance209. But a similar fate befell such towns in Italy, where many borghi franchi withered within a few decades, and for the same reasons. This is a topic to which, as Settia has observed, Italian historians have paid insufficient attention210. Far from being neglected, the manumission of serfs is, by contrast, an issue where revisionism has been in full

207 Stabel, Dwarfs among Giants, passim. For the quarter of Ghent cfr. Id., De kleine stad in Vlaanderen. Bevolkingsdynamiek en economische functies van de kleine en secundaire stedelijke centra in het Gentse kwartier (14de-16de eeuw), Paleis der Academiën, Buxelles 1995. 208 Cfr. Die Zähringer. Eine Tradition und ihre Erforschung, ed. K. Schmid, Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1986. 209 T. Scott, Kleine Städte, keine Städte. Das so genannte urbane Netz in Südwestdeutschland im ausgehenden Mittelalter, in Minderstädte – Küm- merformen – gefreite Dörfer. Studien zur Urbanität und das Märkteproblem, ed. H. Knittler, Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, Linz 2006, pp. 181-202, esp. 193-7; H. Ammann, Über das waadtländische Städtewesen im Mittelalter und über landschaftliches Städtewesen im allge- meinen, in «Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte», 4, 1954, pp. 1-87. 210 Settia, Epilogo, pp. 432-3. But note the comments of P. Guglielmotti, Ricerche sull’organizzazione del territorio nella Liguria medievale, Reti Medievali E-Book, Firenze U.P., Firenze 2005, p. 53 and her discussion of the spate of contemporaneous seigneurial foundations in the 12th century as Genoa’s initiative withered, pp. 55-87. 52 Primo piano spate for several decades. While it is true that emancipation from serfdom fell chronologically together with the rise of popolo regimes211, whose ostensibly anti-aristocratic or anti-magnate policies may have hastened the process212, both the nature of those regimes, now seen as no less oli- garchic than those which preceded or succeeded them, and the highly varied practical reasons for cancelling servile obligations, suggest that no general principle of «liberty» guided the cities’ actions or attended serfdom’s demise. In short, there were always strings attached. As is now recognized, the cities, dominated socially by aristocrats and landowners, however mercantile their economic profile, had mixed feelings about the emancipation of serfs, Siena being a prime example213. It may be true, as Francesca Boc- chi has argued, that free labour was always more produc- tive than servile214, but such modern calculations of economic rationality are unlikely to have weighed heavily in the thirteenth century, unless one allows that the erosion of manorialism and its replacement by leasehold farming rendered tenure by villeinage less attractive to landlords than the flexibility afforded by fixed-term commercial leases. In truth, lords had other means at their disposal to coerce manpower: by raising entry-fines or rack-renting, but above all by recourse to share-cropping215. For their part, the cities’ motives were a nice blend of expediency and necessity. Unlike the custom in Ger-

211 There are examples before popolo regimes, Vercelli in 1243 being the most frequently cited. Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 105; Castagnet- ti, Comunità rurali, p. 338; Ascheri, Città-Stato, pp. 131-2; Occhipinti, Ita- lia dei comuni, p. 111; F. Panero, Schiavi, servi e villani nell’Italia medievale, Paravia Scriptorium, Torino 1999, pp. 285-6. But Vercelli’s action took place against the background of internal factionalism between aristocracy and popolo. A.M. Rapetti, I borghi franchi del Piemonte centro-settentrionale: No- vara, Vercelli, Ivrea, in Borghi nuovi, pp. 314-5. For 12th century examples cfr. Castagnetti, Comunità rurali, pp. 336-7. 212 Cfr. Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 111; Tabacco, Struggle for Pow- er, p. 232; Chittolini, Signorie rurale e feudi, p. 604. That is doubtless why Siena’s government, dominated by such interests, refused to contemplate grants of collective enfranchisement, except in very rare cases. Bocchi, Città e l’organizzazione, p. 73. 213 Jones, Medieval agrarian society, p. 403; Pullan, Early Renaissance Italy, p. 92. 214 Bocchi, Città e campagne, p. 102. Since most «serfs» were person- ally free in terms of legal status, the difference consisted in the degree of economic dependence. 215 Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 166-70; Id., Medieval agrarian society, p. 403. Scott, Italian City-State 53 man cities that Stadtluft macht frei, serfs who left the land in Italy did not automatically secure their freedom after a year and a day. The Italian cities cast a cool eye on runaway serfs216 (not surprisingly given their hypertrophic populations), though in point of fact many – but by no means all – immigrants were usually free men of some means217. In any case, manumission did not absolve countrydwellers from the obligation to carry out public works in the contado, such as road or bridge repairs, on the cities’ behalf by means of corvées218. The cities were especially concerned to ensure that if serfs did as- pire to freedom by emigrating then some family members should stay behind on the land to ensure its continued cultivation (as we have seen in Siena)219, and that applied especially to those working the estates of urban proprietors!220 Nevertheless, the cities’ fundamental de- sire was to increase revenues. Serfs did not pay taxes: by emancipating them, the cities brought them into the ﬁs- cal net. That was famously the case in Bologna with its register of manumissions, the Liber Paradisus in 1256- 57, which is so well known that it requires no elaboration here221. It would be easy to reach a cynical conclusion, namely that the cities’ cancellation of serfdom was intended to replace the lords’ feudal dominion222. Not everyone shares Jones’s view that judicial freedom led to economic degradation; both Waley and Occhipinti have

216 Larner, Italy, p. 158. 217 Hyde, Society and Politics, p. 27. 218 Pinto, Rapporti economici, pp. 54-5. Labour services, however, have no intrinsic link to serfdom, though they often formed part of servile obligations. 219 Ascheri, Città-Stato, p. 133; Cammarosano, Campagne senesi, pp. 161-2. 220 Pinto, Rapporti economici, p. 48. 221 Pini, Classe politica, p. 114; Id., La politica demograﬁca ‘ad elastico’ di Bologna fra il XII e il XIV secolo, in Id., Città medievali e demograﬁa storica: Bologna, Romagna, Italia (secc. XIII-XV), CLUEB, Bologna 1996, pp. 121-30; Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 72; Jones, Medieval agrarian society, pp. 403-4; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, pp. 112-13; Waley, Italian City-Republics, p. 67; Bocchi, Città e l’organizzazione, pp. 74-80; H. Keller, Die Aufhebung der Hörigkeit und die Idee menschlicher Freiheit in italienischen Kommunen des 13. Jahrhunderts, in Die abendländische Frei- heit vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. Der Wirkungszusammenhang von Idee und Wirklichkeit im europäischen Vergleich, ed. J. Fried, Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1991, pp. 389-407. 222 Cfr. Jones, Italian City-State, p. 511. 54 Primo piano expressed reservations223, though no one now believes that the cities’ policies were informed by anything other than self-interest, albeit conceivably by enlightened self- interest. All that needs to be added is that the German cities offered their rural subjects no prospect of manumission, though under the impact of the Peasants’ War of 1524-26 several of them went through the motions224.

9. Jurisdictional exclusivity

It is a commonplace of Italian historiography that the Italian City-States enjoyed jurisdictional exclusivity within or over their contadi, whereas cities north of the Alps never achieved a territorium clausum. The most de- cisive exponent of this view is Giorgio Chittolini. With his eye on Germany, he argues that not even large City- States such as Nuremberg possessed full jurisdictional rights over their hinterlands225. Given the frequent enclaves, condominia, and disputed claims for sovereignty between the German cities and their princely neighbours, it is hard to demur at this judgement226. For Flanders, where the three leading cities never achieved – and, some would argue, never aspired to – territorial statehood, the issue does not arise. But for Switzerland, matters are not so simple. The smaller City-States undoubtedly strug- gled to achieve judicial exclusivity over their subject territories, yet Bern and Zürich effectively succeeded, albeit with setbacks, in stages, and over a long time-span. But if this equates to Chittolini’s «agonized process of the acquisition of disparate rights and possessions», no such

223 Waley, Italian City-Republics, p. 67; Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 103. 224 T. Scott, South-west German serfdom reconsidered, in Forms of Ser- vitude in Northern and Central Europe. Decline, Resistance, and Expansion, eds. P. Freedman and M. Bourin, Brepols, Turnhout 2005, pp. 115-28; cfr. Id., Wandel und Beharrung der Untertänigkeit: Die südwestdeutsche Leib- herrschaft/Leibeigenschaft in komparativer Sicht, in Untertanen, Herrschaft und Staat in Böhmen und im ‘Alten Reich’. Sozialgeschichtliche Studien zur Frühen Neuzeit, eds. M. Cerman and R. Luft, Oldenbourg, Monaco di Ba- viera 2005, pp. 291-313. 225 G. Chittolini, Gli stati cittadini italiani, in Europa im späten Mittel- alter. Politik – Gesellschaft – Kultur, eds. R.C. Schwinges, C. Hesse and P. Moraw, Oldenbourg, Monaco di Baviera 2006, p. 159. 226 Cfr. Scott, City-State, passim. Scott, Italian City-State 55 constraints applied to the Italian cities, whose assertion of full and universal sovereignty, in his view, preﬁgured the modern principle of territoriality227. Elsewhere, however, Chittolini qualiﬁes their achievement, describing it as a mere quasi-sovranità228, and argues that the cities resorted to a division of power between centre and periphery, in a diarchy or dualism reminiscent of the Ständestaat, the society of Estates, beloved of German historiography!229 These arguments must not be confused with the sur- vival of powerful feudatories in many areas of northern Italy. Nor must they be confused with the quite distinct phenomenon of «refeudalization», which Chittolini and others have traced in the duchy of Milan under the Vis- conti and Sforza230. Feudal landlordship and peasant subjection did not disappear231. Rather, what was at stake was

227 Chittolini, Poteri urbani e potere feudali-signorili, p. 102: «Un tor- mentato processo di acquisizione di possessi o diritti diversi e disparati». Cfr. Id., Territoriale Organisation und Stadtbezirke im spätmittelalterlichen Italien, in Hochmittelalterliche Territorialstrukturen, p. 12; Id., Geography of the contadi, p. 430; Id., Italian City-State, p. 595. 228 Chittolini, Stati cittadini italiani, p. 159: «Diversamente da ciò [the cities of Germany] il contado italiano è un territorio relativamente compatto su cui il comune urbano soltanto possiede tutti i diritti, di giurisdizione, di imposizione fiscale, di amministrazione. Tutti questi diritti sono unificati in un unico concetto, una sorta di quasi-sovranità [my emphasis], quale com- pere a un organismo superiorem non recognoscens». 229 Cfr. La crisi degli ordinamenti comunali e le origini dello stato del Rinascimento, a cura di G. Chittolini, il Mulino, Bologna 1979, pp. 20-6, 38. The arguments in his introduction are summed up by E. Fasano Guarini, Gli stati dell’Italia centro-settentrionale tra quattro e cinquecento: continui- tà e trasformazioni, in «Società e Storia», 21, 1983), at p. 629 thus: «Il sistema sembra fondarsi su una divisione quasi contrattuale del potere tra governo centrale e periferia, su una sorta di “diarchia” o “dualismo”, non senza ana- logia con lo “Stato per ceti” dalla storiografia tedesca». Cfr. Ead., Center and periphery, in The Origins of the State in Italy 1300-1600, ed. J. Kirshner, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1995, p. 84. 230 Cfr. the references at n. 43 above; Gamberini, Principe, pp. 252, 255-6; F. Cengarle, Immagine di potere e prassi di governo. La politica feudale di Filippo Maria Visconti, Viella, Roma 2006, esp. pp. 42, 45, 73, 96-7, 99-100, 132. 231 The cession of judicial rights in return for unimpaired landlordship is stressed by Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, p. 90. Early noble submissions might involve oaths of allegiance and the undertaking to offer aid in times of war and peace (ad hostem et ad parlamentum) without being explicitly vassalatic, as at Perugia. P. Cammarosano, Città e campagna: rapporti politici ed economici, in Società e istituzioni dell’Italia comunale: l’esempio di Perugia (secoli XII-XIV). Congresso storico internazionale, Perugia, 6-9 novembre 1985), Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria, Perugia 1988, t. I, p. 310. Other contracts with overt vassalatic connota- tions such as the feudo oblato («surrender and regrant») have already been mentioned. Occhipinti, Italia dei comuni, p. 107. For Piacenza cfr. Racine, Plaisance, pp. 276-9. 56 Primo piano judicial overlordship, that is, jurisdictional supremacy and exclusivity. Here opinions diverge. Jones, never slow to highlight the feudal nature of Italian civic regimes, in- sists that «territorially speaking, City-States were never unitary, but an association of communes and powers of various kinds»232. Indeed, as early as 1200 some cities were transferring back to feudatories portions of urban territory: he instances Pisa, Parma, Lucca, and Siena233. A classic instance in later times is Brescia. After Venice’s absorp- tion of Brescia into its terraferma in 1426, La Serenissima was obliged to confirm the privileges and immunities of local powerholders in the contado: the feudal nobility retained its recently acquired fiefs, fiscal exemptions, and legal privileges – and these were the same men who sat at the heart of the civic magistracy! No wonder that they were able to escape the city’s judicial outreach, retaining both civil and criminal jurisdiction in their villages234. A similar tale has been told for Reggio Emilia by Andrea Gamberini235. An even more extreme case is Parma, where the Visconti were unwilling, or unable, to unravel the pattern of feudal-seigneurial domination of the contado, which, by the fifteenth century (as the city lamented), had deprived it of effective control of three-quarters of its traditional contado236. This is what Pini meant by the scollamento di contado (its «unsticking», i.e. division or disintegration)237, and even Chittolini concedes that this marked an inversion of those features which had stamped the communal era238.

232 P.J. Jones, Comuni e signorie: la città-stato nell’Italia del tardo Me- dioevo, in Crisi degli ordinamenti, pp. 110-1. 233 Jones, Italian City-State, p. 547. 234 J.M. Ferraro, Feudal-patrician investment in the Bresciano and the politics of the Estimo, 1426-1641, in «Studi Veneziani», n. s. 7, 1986, pp. 31-4. The ﬁefs were of relatively recent origin, however, having been created as part of the Viscontis’ policy of «refeudalization» in the duchy of Milan. Cfr. Chittolini, Signorie rurali e feudi, p. 653. 235 Gamberini, Territorialità, pp. 47-71. 236 R. Greci, Parma medievale. Economia e società nel Parmense dal Tre al Quattrocento, Battei, Parma 1992, pp. 30, 201 n. 10; M. Gentile, Terre e poteri. Parma e il Parmense nel ducato visconteo all’inizio del Quattrocento, Unicopli, Milano 2001, p. 184. 237 Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni, pp. 113-6. Grillo, Milano, p. 593 observes that the cities’ jurisdictional expansion experienced «evidenti ral- lentamenti, “scollamenti”, vere e proprie inversioni di rotta». 238 Crisi degli ordinamenti, p. 9. Scott, Italian City-State 57

The examples of a territorium clausum among the Italian City-States are in truth extraordinarily few. It is now recognized that both lay and ecclesiastical territorial signorie survived and even flourished in the hinterlands of Italian cities under the latter’s political umbrella in the thirteenth century and beyond, with only a few large communes – Florence, Bologna, Verona – keeping the feudal hydra at bay239. Pisa’s attempts at administrative reorganization in its contado a century later fell foul of entrenched seigneurial jurisdictions there240. For Siena Bowsky has reached a similar verdict241. The only city unequivocally to have achieved a territorium clausum, Varanini has argued, was Padua, though it took until the fifteenth century for the protracted process of eliminat- ing jurisdictional and fiscal enclaves and asserting civic control over them to be completed242. These remarks apply, of course, to the contadi of the cities themselves; they do not refer to the territories of those cities which had fallen under the dominion of larger ones243. In general, the regional City-States were content to let their subject cities retain control of their contadi, through a spectrum of lax governance or benign neglect in the Venetian terraferma244, to the alignment of the civic elites to ducal in-

239 G.M. Varanini, Local communities and states (1350-1650), in State and Society: Italy 1350-1650, ed. S.R. Epstein (in press), p. 2. I am grateful to Prof. Varanini for sending me a copy of this paper which, in view of Larry Epstein’s untimely death, is now unlikely to appear in print. 240 Varanini, Dal comune allo stato regionale, p. 698. 241 W.M. Bowsky, City and contado: Military relationships and communal bonds in fourteenth-century Siena, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, p. 93: «The Italian city-states of the late middle ages and early Renaissance were not so unified juridically as are most modern states. Portions of what we might consider the Sienese “state” had not yet been incorporated into the contado». 242 Varanini, Dal comune allo stato regionale, pp. 698-9. 243 Even in Brescia, for there the whole point was that powerful feudatories had the city by the throat before the submission to Venice, and the latter could do little about it. 244 G.M. Varanini, Centro e periferia nello stato regionale. Costanti e variabili nel rapporto tra Venezia e le città della Terraferma nel Quattro- cento, in Società, economia, istituzioni. Elementi per la conoscenza della Repubblica Veneta, t. I: Istituzioni ed economia, Cierre, Sommacampagna (VR) 2002, pp. 86-7; Id., Gli statuti delle città della Terraferma veneta nel Quattrocento, in Statuti, città, territori in Italia e Germania tra Medioevo ed Età moderna, a cura di G. Chittolini e D. Willoweit, il Mulino, Bologna 1991, p. 300; J.S. Grubb, Firstborn of Venice. Vicenza in the Early Renais- sance State, Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore-MD-London 1988, pp. 176-7. Cfr. the nuanced observations by G.M. Varanini, Comuni cittadini e stato 58 Primo piano terests in Milan, accompanied by a policy of infeudation under the Visconti which separated many localities from their civic rulers245, and finally to occasionally harsh subjection and administrative reorganization riding roughshod over the boundaries of existing contadi in the case of Florence246. But even here, as Andrea Zorzi has insisted, the aim was to govern a dominion, not to administer a state247: what mat- tered was political control, the guarantee of obedience or alliance, rather than the integration of existing polities into a unitary state248. That can be illustrated by Pistoia which after its early subjection to Florence obtained far-reaching exemptions from the jurisdiction of Florentine magistra- cies in the mid-fifteenth century, exemptions which were subsequently amplified249. In a qualifying comment, however, Chittolini argues that recent revisionism, with its just criticism of teleological state-building, administrative ra- tionalization, and bureaucratic fiscality, and with its fash- ionable emphasis on kin and family networks, clientage, and patronage, as well as informal ties between urban elites on a personal level, runs the danger of eroding Florentine state-building to vanishing point250. Be that as it may, it was not until the 1560s, for instance, that Florence undertook to demarcate and defend the frontiers of the distretto of Cortona, a key strategic fortress bordering the Papal States, an action which Céline Perol regards as integral to the constitution of a territorial state251. regionale. Ricerche sulla Terraferma veneta nel Quattrocento, Libreria edi- trice universitaria, Verona 1992, pp. 7-13, 26-7, 36-7, 45. 245 In addition to the essays by Chittolini at n. 43 above, and Varani- ni, Dal comune allo stato regionale, pp. 704-7, cfr. Gamberini, Principe, pp. 255-6, and Cengarle, Immagine, pp. 99-100. 246 G. Chittolini, Ricerche sull’ordinamento territoriale del dominio fiorentino agli inizi del secolo XV, in Formazione dello stato regionale, pp. 231- 54; Zorzi, Organisation, p. 255. For Arezzo cfr. Bertelli, Potere oligarchico, pp. 34-6. 247 A. Zorzi, The ‘material constitution’ of the Florentine dominion, in Florentine Tuscany. Structures and Practices of Power, eds. W.J. Connell and A. Zorzi, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2000, p. 22. 248 Lazzarini, Italia degli Stati territoriali, pp. 102-3. 249 W.J. Connell, Clientelismo e stato territoriale. Il potere fiorentino a Pistoia nel XV secolo, in «Società e Storia», 14, 1991, pp. 526-9. His essential argument is that Florence chose to exercise its influence by informal means, through patronage and clientage, as exemplified by marriage alliances between the Albizzi and one of Pistoia’s factional leaders, the Panciatichi. Ivi, p. 533. 250 G. Chittolini, Comment, in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 333-45. 251 C. Perol, Cortona. Pouvoirs et sociétés aux confines de la Toscane XVe- XVIe siècle, École Française de Rome, Roma 2004, p. 33: «“L’invention” de la frontière, entendue comme point de séparation et de contact entre deux en- Scott, Italian City-State 59

What we are left with is a political jigsaw of composite states, regional states, and small seigneurial states, in which the erstwhile primacy of commercial and economic dominion gave way over time to territorial consolidation under the impact of war, harsh ﬁscality, increasing bu- reaucracy, and refeudalization252. Recently, Pierre Savy has constructed an elaborate typology of the possible permutations of City-State formation in Italy253. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is no consensus among Italian historians about the quality of statehood achieved by the close of the Middle Ages in the polities of central-northern Italy. Both Chittolini (softening his earlier claims) and Varanini, for instance, have endorsed the concept of «pal- lid statehood», but Gamberini and Cengarle suggest that in the case of Milan the Viscontis’ efforts to construct a territorial state deserve a more positive epithet 254. These debates cannot be taken further here. It is none the less remarkable that Chittolini once likened the Italian City- States’ achievement of sovereignty to the elaboration of full Landeshoheit by the German principalities from an earlier and more contingent Landesherrschaft255. The scope for comparison between Italy and the German- speaking lands has by no means been exhausted.

tités territoriales, constitue un des thèmes fondamentaux de la formation des États territoriaux». That is not to deny an earlier awareness of the principle of territoriality, whereby Florence sought to eliminate «grey zones», as has been demonstrated for the late 13th century by P. Pirillo, Fines, termini et limites. I confini nella formazione dello Stato fiorentino, in Guglielmotti, Distinguere, http://www.dssg.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/saggi/Confini_Pirillo.htm. 252 Fasano Guarini, Stati dell’Italia centro-settentrionale, p. 629; Ead., Center and periphery, p. 84, following J.H. Elliot, A Europe of composite monarchies, in «Past and Present», 137, 1992, pp. 48-71; A. Gamberini, Lo stato visconteo. Linguaggi politiche e dinamiche costituzionali, Franco An- geli, Milano 2005, esp. his introduction, pp. 11-30. 253 P. Savy, Gli Stati italiani del XV secolo: una proposta sulle tipologie, in «Archivio Storico Italiano», 163, 2005, pp. 735-59. 254 Chittolini, Comment, p. 337; Gamberini, Principe, pp. 258, 264 n. 72; Cengarle, Immagine, p. 96. For the contrast with the earlier and less systematic efforts of the della Torre cfr. P. Grillo, Un’egemonia sovracittadina: la famiglia della Torre di Milano e le città lombarde (1259-1277), in «Rivista Storica Italiana», 120, 2008, pp. 694-730. 255 Chittolini, Territoriale Organisation, pp. 16-7.