User:Walrasiad/Communes

The fall of the Carolingian empire in the late 9th C. had left Italy in a state of chaos. Northern Italy was divided between several great but equally-matched magnates - the marquises of Friuli, Spoleto, Tuscany, Ivrea, etc. - competing for the crown of the Lombard kingdom, occasionally backed by a foreign power. In central Italy, Rome and the Papal States had fallen into the hands of the Roman lay nobility (the "pornocracy"). Southern Italy was engulfed in the multi-faceted chaos of competing Lombard principalities (Benevento, Salerno, Capua), Byzantine themes (Apulia, Calabria) and self-ruling maritime republics (Naples, Amalfi, Gaeta and, further away, Venice).

As lord fought against lord, the cities had been neglected, their fortifications crumbling, open to the sack of streams of new foreign raiders of alien religions - the cavalcading pagan Magyars from the Pannonian Basin, seaborne Muslim Arabs from Sicily and Ifriqiya and Slavic pirates from Dalmatia.

In Carolingian times, Italy had been divided into counties, and each county (contado) was ruled by a count-bishop pair. The count was responsible for secular matters (judicial & military), the bishop for spiritual matters. The range of their authority was identical - the boundaries of the county usually coincided with the diocese, it was only their jobs that were different.

As the secular lord, the Frankish count, was usually absent in the battlefield. The task of maintaining the walls and defenses of the cities fell by default upon his spiritual co-ruler, the town's leading citizen, the bishop. Around 900, we begin to see this ratified by royal decree, with the official grants of urban "royal property" (walls, towers, roads, tolls, etc.) to the bishop. The earliest such grant is probably that given to the Bishop of Modena in 892, then Bergamo in 904, and subsequently most other bishops of northern Italy by the 920s. The great dispenser of these grants was the Italian king Berengar of Friuli.

These early royal grants did not pose any great conflict. City walls, towers, tolls, etc. were regalian rights, never conceded in the vassalage contract with the count. In other words, they were always the king's property to dispose with as he wished. Handing royal property over to bishops may affront, but did not legally infringe, on the count's rule over the city.

With the Ottonian arrival in the 960s, however, the bishops went further. With royal approval, the bishops absconded with the count's right of jurisdiction within the city walls. That is, the bishops took on functions traditionally reserved for the count - dispensing law, judging cases, appointing magistrates within the city. Thus was introduced the legal division between town and country - the bishop ruled within the city, the count without.

This was a clear infringement on traditional rights of counts. But the Ottonians, as usurping foreign interlopers, never held out much hope of being popular among native lords. They deliberately deployed the city bishops against the rural magnates. The bishops were critical in helping the German monarch topple the great Italian marquises and break up their large duchies, allowing the German dynasty to maintain a hold in Italy against any native pretender.

But the untimely death of Otto III in 1004 opened a struggle for succession and changed the equation once more. With the strong hand of the German monarch temporarily lifted, Italian feudal magnates tried to recover their authority over the cities. But the bishops fought back, rallying the city population against the magnates. Led by their bishops, the city militias went on the offensive, capturing the rural castles and manors in their vicinity, forcing the rural nobility, at spearpoint, to take up residence within the city, where they could be more closely monitored. The authority and jurisdiction of the bishops consequently began to expand beyond the city walls, deep into the countryside, to also cover the county (contado) as a whole.

The legal justification for this last step rested on an opportunistic confounding of the bishop's juridical and spiritual authority. At their most extensive, the Ottonian charters might extend the bishop's juridical authority to a radius of three miles or so beyond the city walls, and, if very generous, also over church-owned and/or citizen-owned lands in the county. However, since the time of Charlemagne, the bishops had spiritual authority over the entire county (the borders of county and diocese usually coincided). So, once the rural nobles were militarily defeated, they conveniently interpreted that coincidence to abolish the legal distinction between town and country, and place it all under the bishop.

The capture of the contado changed the political, social and economic configuration of northern Italy.

The final step in this evolution was for the citizens to topple the bishop and seize the government of the city - and the county - for themselves. This step came out of a complicated confluence of forces, in many ways unique to northern Italy.

The force was part economic. Feudalization had never been as complete in Italy as elsewhere in Europe. The self-subsistent feudal manors, the basic economic unit of the Carolingian empire, were never quite as self-subsistent in Italy as they were in France or Germany. Nonetheless, the bishops' campaigns against the surrounding lords put a full stop to any incipient feudalization in the Lombard kingdom. By battering down the gates of the rural manors, the bishops firmly reconnected towns with the countryside. Through this, northern Italy experienced an economic boom - markets resumed operation, rural estates specialized for the market, productivity leaped forward and new wealth flourished.

That wealth complicated the relationship between town and gown. The bishop usually distributed the stolen rural estates among his own - his great clerics, their family members, their concubines and illegitimate children. Episcopal patronage machines built a new oppressive clerical class within the cities. Hitherto, the city populations had looked to their bishop as their protector against the noble wolves at the gate. But having catapulted themselves to being the greatest landowners in the county, the bishop's clique formed a new elite, frequently in alliance (by relations and office) with the old noble families that now resided in the city. The danger was no longer the wolves outside, but the wolves inside the city, with the bishop at their head.

The millennial of Christ's birth (1000) and death (1033) had produced an upsurge of popular piety and fed a wave of religious movements - mostly peaceful but sometimes violent. The puritan resurgence fed a movement to reform the corrupt and sinful habits of the clergy themselves. And no clergy was more corrupt and ill-behaved than the newly-enriched episcopal elite of northern Italy. Consequently it is no surprise that the ambitious lesser citizens of the Lombard cities were quick to be infected with this particular strand of religious fever. Thus emerged the pataria movement. Puritan mobs, known as patarini, organized themselves in Milan and other cities and attacked the estates and homes of "improper" clerics with furious abandon.

Into this complicated tension entered Emperor and Pope. Rome and the Papal States had, for nearly two centuries, been firmly under the control of the lay Roman nobility,. the papacy filled with powerless puppets, the clergy cowered. But the Roman nobles were, of course, not of one mind. And competing factions of nobles each had a stable of popes and clerics. At any moment, there might be two or three popes, each controlling different quarters of the city of Rome. The emperor's dealings with the pope was really deals cut with a particular faction of Roman nobles.

But some of the initiatives pursued surreptitiously by the Roman clergy under the noses of their secular masters had begun to bear fruit. The Cluniac reform pursued in the 10th C. had created a new parallel ecclesiastical edifice based on independent abbeys. Inimical to the episcopal establishment, the abbeys produced men of reformist spirit, prepared to seize back the church from the clutches of the nobility and restore it to a proper and pious clergy. The reformists from the abbeys and the radical urban patarini conjoined in purpose, if not quite method, at this critical point in history.