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

A Historian of Germany Looks at the Italian City-State* Tom Scott Behind the seemingly quixotic title lies a straightfor- ward 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 monar- chies 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 differ- ences may prompt fresh questions about the genesis and character of Italian City-States. That, in turn, may en- courage 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 dif- ferences 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 set- tlement 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 distinc- tion 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 oth- ers 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 land- holders in the own right)6. 2. The terminology of the City-State From the late nineteenth century the territorial expan- sion 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 with- out 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 hin- terlands 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.

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