Sleepwalking into a New World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wickham
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The People ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Italian City ◽  
New Form ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. This book takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. The book provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. It argues that, in all but a few cases, the élite of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. The book makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. It describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites “chosen by the people,” and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. This book reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.

Communes and Despots: The City State In Late-Medieval Italy

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 71-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

scholarly journals Fighting Corruption in the Italian City-State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The Rich ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

While auditing practices for public officials existed in all the Italian peninsula during the communal era, they had nowhere as prominent a place, or better surviving records, as in the Italian city-states. In this chapter, the author shows that the regulation of sindacato, an end-of-term audit for urban officials, was of a kind with normative and literary discourses about accountability, good government and the common good, but argues that these cannot be seen in isolation from documentary evidence. Based on a detailed analysis of the rich judicial and administrative records from fourteenth-century Perugia, this chapter shows that the connection between accountability of office and political legitimacy implicit in the sindacato is less straightforward than commonly thought. Rather than a marker of transparent, participatory politics, the sindacato was a complex, inherently biased, often slow and ineffectual mechanism, which could conceal as much as it revealed about the administration of the city.

scholarly journals Secret origins of the state: the structural basis ofraison d'état

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Structural Basis ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Publicly Traded ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
Bill Of Exchange ◽  
Double Entry ◽  
The Town

The Italian city-state system occupies a special place in the canon of orthodox international relations. For, as Martin Wight says, ‘it was among the Italian powers that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic system’. And of course this was not all they invented. In addition to the earliest modern discourse ofRealpolitik(‘Machiavelli’, Carr tells us, ‘is the first important political realist’), it is in the Italian city-states that we find the first routine use of double-entry book-keeping, of publicly traded state debt, of marine insurance, of sophisticated instruments of credit (such as the bill of exchange), of commercial and banking firms coordinating branch activity across the continent, and so on. Here, too, the citizen militias gave way earliest to the mercenary armies that would later characterize European Absolutism; and within the town walls, a population given over increasingly to commerce and manufacture elaborated new forms of urban class conflict.

Philip James Jones 1921–2006

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Dean
Keyword(s):  
Modern History ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
James Jones ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

Philip James Jones (1921–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was one of the most distinguished, complex, and challenging of medieval historians. His works on the Italian city-states of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and on Italy's agrarian history are monuments built to last, benchmarks that defined the field for a generation. Jones was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and was awarded the Serena Medal for Italian studies in 1988. He won a major open scholarship in Modern History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Jones took a First in Modern History in 1945 and was appointed to a research studentship (Senior Demyship) at Magdalen College. He had also secured a temporary teaching post at Glasgow University. All Jones's previous works flowed into the 700 pages of his mammoth book Italian City-State: from Commune to Signoria.

scholarly journals The Swiss City Canton: A POlitical Invention

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-408
Author(s):  
Karl W. Deutsch ◽  
Hermann Weilenmann
Keyword(s):  
European Cities ◽  
The North ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The Alps ◽  
The Creation ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

All major Swiss cities are located north of the Alps. Their development can be understood best as part of the development of the North European cities—those of Germany, Flanders and France—and as part of the communal movement as it developed in those areas. Yet the cities that eventually became Swiss are those that accepted more of the characteristic institutions of Italian city-states than did the rest, and it is this acceptance of certain Italian practices—particularly the creation of a rural territory and thus eventually of a territorial city-state—that made those cities into city Cantons, able to take part in the formation of Switzerland.

scholarly journals “Fighting Corruption in the Italian City-State: Perugian Audit Procedures (sindacato) in the Fourteenth Century,” in A History of Anticorruption: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, ed. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and G. Geltner. Oxford: Oxford university Press, 103-21

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The Rich ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

While auditing practices for public officials existed in all the Italian peninsula during the communal era, they had nowhere as prominent a place, or better surviving records, as in the Italian city-states. In this chapter, the author shows that the regulation of sindacato, an end-of-term audit for urban officials, was of a kind with normative and literary discourses about accountability, good government and the common good, but argues that these cannot be seen in isolation from documentary evidence. Based on a detailed analysis of the rich judicial and administrative records from fourteenth-century Perugia, this chapter shows that the connection between accountability of office and political legitimacy implicit in the sindacato is less straightforward than commonly thought. Rather than a marker of transparent, participatory politics, the sindacato was a complex, inherently biased, often slow and ineffectual mechanism, which could conceal as much as it revealed about the administration of the city.

Political Conflict in the Italian City States

1968 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauro Martines
Keyword(s):  
Central Italy ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
Do So

POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN ITALIAN CITY STATES WAS NOT FOR MEN who valued themselves more than they valued politics. The stakes were too high. Exile or loss of life and property were too often the penalties. The difficult legal circumstances which attended organized political opposition went back to the early commune, to the fervour of the civil struggles that began late in the 12th century. These were to affect the character of the opposition down to the 16th century. If the contenders in political strife sometimes expressed a readiness to compromise, they revealed, just as often, an inability to do so. And in critical times the desire for the physical elimination of political opponents easily emerged.Major rivalries of the 11th and 12th centuries inadvertently favoured the rise of local government. The communes – rendered bolder in many cases by their quickening economies – profited from the conflicts between papacy and empire, between the emperor and the German princes, and between the episcopal and comital powers in Italy. As imperial authority waned, local groups all over north and central Italy pressed forward to take over the administration of their own affairs.

Religious Architecture in Latium and Etruria, c. 900-500 BC

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte R. Potts
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Detailed History ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Religious Architecture ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

Religious Architecture in Latium and Etruria, c. 900-500 BC presents the first comprehensive treatment of cult buildings in western central Italy from the Iron Age to the Archaic Period. By analysing the archaeological evidence for the form of early religious buildings and their role in ancient communities, it reconstructs a detailed history of early Latial and Etruscan religious architecture that brings together the buildings and the people who used them. The first part of the study examines the processes by which religious buildings changed from huts and shrines to monumental temples, and explores apparent differences between these processes in Latium and Etruria. The second part analyses the broader architectural, religious, and topographical contexts of the first Etrusco-Italic temples alongside possible rationales for their introduction. The result is a new and extensive account of when, where, and why monumental cult buildings became features of early central Italic society.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document