The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century by William Klapp Williams
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William Klapp Williams >> The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century
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7 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY STUDIES
IN
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor
History is past Politics and Politics present History.--_Freeman_
NINTH SERIES
V-VI
The Communes of Lombardy from the VI. to the X. Century
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE CAUSES WHICH LED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF
MUNICIPAL UNITY AMONG THE LOMBARD COMMUNES
BY WILLIAM KLAPP WILLIAMS, PH.D.
NEWBERRY LIBRARY, CHICAGO
May, June, 1891
"Est error spretus, quo Langobarda juventus
Errabat, verum loquitur nunc pagina sensum."
RHOTARI: _Legum Prologus_.
THE COMMUNES OF LOMBARDY FROM THE VI. TO THE X. CENTURY.
PART I.
THE LOMBARD CONQUEST AND ITS RESULTS.
Before tracing the beginnings of renewed municipal life in Northern
Italy, we must consider the conditions of land and people, which first
rendered possible and then fostered the spirit of local independence
of which such beginnings were the natural expression. To do this we
must commence our researches with the first domination of the Lombards
in the country.
In detail the story of the conquest of Northern Italy by the Lombards
under Alboin, in 568, hardly differs materially from that of the
inroads of other barbarian tribes of the north on the fertile plains
of Italy. The causes were the same. Where the distinction is to be
found from other such invasions, is in the results of the Lombard
occupation, and in the different methods which the Lombards adopted so
as to render their power and their possessions permanent. Let us look
at the character of this invading host, which sweeps like a tide, at
once destroying and revivifying, over the exhausted though still
fertile plains of the Po and the Adige. Are we to call it a moving
people or an advancing army? Are we to call its leaders (_duces_, from
_ducere_ to lead), heads of clans and families, or captains and
generals? Finally, is the land to be invaded, or is the land to be
settled? To all these questions the only answer is to be found in the
conception of the absolute union of both the kinds of functions
described. A people is moving from a home whose borders have proved
too narrow for its increasing numbers; an army is conquering a new
home, where plenty will take the place of want, and luxury of
privation. It is not an army marching at the command of a strongly
centralized power to conquer a rich neighbor, and force a defeated
enemy to pay it service or tribute. It is a body which, when it has
conquered as an army, will occupy as a people; when it is established
as a people, will still remain an army. The sword was not turned into
the ploughshare; but the power to wield the sword had given the right
to till the land, and soon the power to hold the land was to give the
right to wear the sword. It was the conquest of a highly civilized
agricultural people--whose very civilization had reduced them to a
stage of moral weakness which rendered them totally unfit to defend
themselves--by a semi-barbarous people, agricultural also, but rude,
uncivilized, independent, owning no rulers but their family or
military chiefs.
The conquerors took possession of the country simply as they would
take possession of a larger farm than they had before owned. Their
riches were only such as served for the support of men--herds, land,
wine and corn. They needed cultivators for their large farm, so
instead of destroying every one with fire and sword, they spared those
of the weak inhabitants of the land who had survived the first
onslaught, in order that they might make use of farmers to cultivate
their new possessions. In most cases they did not make slaves of them,
but tributaries; and after the land had been portioned evenly among
the soldiers of the invading host, the original holders of the land
tilled it themselves, under a system somewhat kindred to the metayer
system as to-day existent in Tuscany and elsewhere, paying, according
to the usual custom adopted by the northern conquerors of Italy,
one-third of the produce[1] to their new masters. The whole
organization of society was on a purely military basis; the soldiers
of the conquering army, although they became landed proprietors, none
the less retained their character and name of soldiers. Hence when
these crude forms of social life began to crystallize into the
carefully marked ranks of the feudal system, the "_milites_"[2] formed
the order of gentlemen, the smaller feudatories, who gave land in fief
to their vassals--generally the old inhabitants--while holding their
own nominally from the "_duces_," or dukes, the representatives of
their former leaders in war, who held their tenure direct from the
king or chief.
As the object of this paper is particularly to trace the origin and
early sources of municipal life in Northern Italy, let us turn and see
what were the effects on the already existing towns, of the inroads of
these hordes of northern barbarians. At the outset I must state
emphatically that all our sources of information as to the
institutional history of this obscure period are exceedingly vague,
meagre and unsatisfactory. The progress of events we can follow with
more or less accuracy from the mazy writings of the early chroniclers;
we can get a fair idea of the judicial and the legislative acts of the
ruling powers by studying and comparing the different codes of laws
that have come down to us; but in a study of the internal municipal
life of these early ages, the student meets again and again with
increasing discouragement, and soon finds himself almost hopelessly
lost in a tangle of doubts and inferences.
In the almost total want of direct evidence, from casual mention
gleaned from the writings of the chroniclers, and from occasional
references in the law codes to municipal offices and regulations,
enough indirect evidence must be sought, to enable us, by the aid of
our powers of reasoning, if not of our imagination, to build up some
history, defective though it be, of municipal life, down to the time
when the internal growth and importance of the cities rendered them
sufficiently prominent political factors to have their deeds and their
progress chronicled. Besides, if we consider the modes by which the
communes slowly rose to independence, it will easily be seen that to
have every step of this slow and almost secret advance chronicled and
given to the world, would have been entirely contrary to the policy of
the cities. These hoped to gain by the neglect of their rulers, and
while clinging pertinaciously to every privilege ever legally granted,
to claim new ones constantly, putting forth as their sole legal title
that slippery claim of precedent and time-honored custom. In that age,
books of reference to prove such claims would have been found alike
inconvenient and unnecessary. All the city folks wished was to be
forgotten and ignored by their superiors, as any notice vouchsafed
them was sure to come only in the restraint of some assumed privilege
or the curtailing of some coveted right.
Hence the principal cause of the poverty of record through all this
period of slow if steady growth; and the disappointed investigator
must in some measure console himself with such a reason. It may be
asked, what of the various local histories of different towns, whose
authors seldom fail to give highflown accounts of their native cities,
even in the remotest and darkest ages of their history? To this
question there is a double answer: in the first place the uttermost
caution must be enjoined in using such material; not only in
separating fact from baseless tradition of a much later period, but in
making large allowance for the heavy strain which a strong feeling of
local patriotism, or civism, puts upon the conscience of the author.
In the second place it must be remembered that most of such histories,
or at least of the monkish or other records from which they derive
their source and most of their material, were written to the glory or
under the auspices of some dominant noble family or ecclesiastical
institution, to whose laudation in ages past and present the humble
author devotes all the resources of his mind, and I am afraid far too
often of his imagination.
Let us now cast a glance at the exhausted civilization of the towns of
Northern Italy, where the formal shell of Roman organization still
remained, after the vigor and life which had produced it had long been
destroyed. To describe the condition of the Roman _municipia_ at the
time of the Teutonic invasions is but to tell a part of the story of
the fall of the Roman Empire. The municipal system, which from the
names and duties of its officers would seem to represent a surprising
amount of local independence in matters of administration, even a
collection of small almost free republics, had lost all its strength
and all its vital power by the grinding exactions of a centralized
despotism, which was compelled to support its declining power by
strengthening the very forces which were working its destruction, at
the expense of destroying those from which it should have gained its
strength. The stability of every state rests ultimately on the wealth
and character of its citizens, and any government which exhausts the
one and degrades the other in an effort to maintain its own unlimited
power has its days numbered. Under the despotic rule of the later
emperors the municipalities had lost all their power, though in theory
their rights were unassailed. The _curia_ could elect its magistrates
as of old, and these magistrates could legislate for the _municipium_,
but by a single word the imperial delegate could annul the choice of
the one and the acts of the other.
The economic condition of the people amounted to little short of
bankruptcy; the possession of wealth, in landed property especially,
having become but a burden to be avoided, and a source of exaction
rather than of satisfaction to the owner. The inequalities of burdens
and of rank were great. The citizens were divided into three classes:
(1) the privileged classes, (2) the Curials, (3) the common people.
The first, freely speaking, were those who had in a manner succeeded
in detaching themselves from the interests of the _municipium_ to
which they belonged; such were the members of the Senate, including
all with the indefinite title of _clarissimi_, the soldiers, the
clergy, the public magistrates as distinguished from the municipal
officers. The second consisted of all citizens of a town, whether
natives--_municipes_--or settlers--_incolae_--who possessed landed
property of more than twenty-five _jugera_, and did not belong to any
privileged class: both these classes were hereditary. The third, of
all free citizens whose poverty debarred them from belonging to either
of the preceding divisions. On the second of these classes, the
Curials, fell all the grinding burdens of the state, the executing of
municipal duties, and the exactions of the central government.
It is not necessary for me to trace here the development of that
financial policy which resulted in the ruin, I may say the
annihilation of this order. Suffice it to say that it formed the
capital fund of the government which exhausted it, and when the source
of supply was destroyed, production ceased, and with it, of course,
all means of governmental support. Where the extinction of this
"middle class" touches the point of our inquiry is in affording an
explanation of a circumstance in the history of the Lombard
subjugation of the Italian towns, which without consideration of this
fact would appear almost incomprehensible. I refer to the utter
passivity of the inhabitants, not only in the matter of resistance to
attack, which the greater strength and courage of the invaders perhaps
rendered useless, but in what is more surprising, the fact that after
the easy conquest was completed, we hear nothing of the manner in
which the people adapted themselves to the totally new condition of
life and of government to which they were subjected. Even if we can
understand hearing nothing of what the people did, at least we should
expect to hear what was done with it, what it became. The story of its
resistance might be short and soon forgotten, but the story of its
sufferings, of its complaints, of struggle against the entire change
in the order and character of its life, should be a long one.
But of this no record, hardly mention even appears. When the central
government falls and the last of its legions are destroyed or have
departed, there seems to be no thought of any other element in
society. If the evidence of the law codes did not tell us that a Roman
population existed, history would record little to indicate its
presence. Not only is even the slightest trace of nationality effaced,
but the merging of the old conditions of life into the new seems of
too little consequence to merit even an allusion. This state of
affairs, as said above, is caused by the annihilation, by the despotic
power of the central government, of that middle class which in times
of prosperity formed the sinews of the state. Of the other classes,
the privileged class, with the exception of the clergy, fell of course
with the government which supported it, and the common people
possessed no individuality, no power, and hardly any rights. Such,
then, was the condition of the towns at the time of the Lombard
invasion, a condition of such abasement and such degradation as
literally to have no history; a condition which indeed can truthfully
be said to merit none.
History tells the story of every great nation on the face of the earth
in three short words, growth, supremacy, decline. Vary the theme as
you may in the countless histories of countless peoples; subdivide the
course of its progress as you will, allowing for different local
causes and different local phenomena, the true philosophy of history
teaches that no real departure from this natural development is
possible. But what if by the violent intervention of some new and
entirely foreign force, another development and another life is given
to the inanimate ashes of the old? What if some nation, fresh from the
woods and fields of the childhood of its growth, come with
overwhelming yet preserving strength and infuse new blood into the
withered veins of its predecessor? This is the problem we now have
before us. How many writers of Italian history have entitled this
chapter in its development "A new Italian Nation formed"! It is not
the old glories of Rome, which had been Italy, returning; it is a new
Italian nation formed. Each word tells a story of its own. It is not
the old galvanized to a second life; it is the new superimposed,
violently if you will, upon it. We do not hear of Athens or of Rome,
of an Alexander or of a Caesar, of a city or of a man. It is an
"Italian nation." It is the individualism of the independent spirit of
the North, which "forms" a nation from the exhausted remains of the
development of centralization of the South. The new idea of distinct
nationality among races of kindred stock was already at work, even
though it did not reach a formal expression till the Treaty of Verdun,
more than two hundred and fifty years later.
I do not mean to imply that we must in any measure ignore the passive
force and influence of the old forms on the new. The old veins receive
the new blood; the new torrent, overrunning everything at first with
the strength of its new life, will find again, even if it deepen, the
channel of the old river: a vanquished civilization will always subdue
and at the same time raise its barbarous conquerors, if they come of a
stock capable of appreciating civilizing influences. In the present
case this means that the men of the North brought the new ideas that
were to form modern history, and let their growth be directed and
assisted, while they were yet too young to stand alone, by some of the
framework which had been built up by the long experience of their
Southern neighbors.
To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study,
this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so
much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the
government of the Italian communes was purely Roman in its forms and
in its conception, or purely Teutonic. The supporters of neither
theory can be said to be in the right. You cannot say that the average
city government was entirely Roman or entirely Teutonic, either in the
laws which guided it, or in the channels by which these laws were
executed and expressed. I think much time and much learning have been
spent on a discussion both fruitless and unnecessary. We cannot err if
we subject the question to a consideration at once critical and
impartial.
The widely differing opinions eagerly supported by different writers
on this point, form a very good example of the deceiving influence of
national feeling on the judgment in matters of historical criticism.
For, on the one hand, we find many German writers ignoring entirely
the old framework of Roman organization, and recognizing only the new
Teutonic life which gave back to it the strength it had lost; on the
other, a host of lesser Italian writers who magnify certain old names
and forms, and mistake them for the substance, making all the new life
of Italy but the return of a past, which belonged to a greatness that
was dead. Many there are of this school in Italy, where you will often
find to-day a commune of three hundred inhabitants, with its one or
two constables wearing the imperial badge, "_Senatus Populusque
Albanensis_" or "_Verulensis_," as the case may be. Truly a suggestive
anachronism! It is true that in remote ages especially, when the
records of history are few and uncertain--and the period we are
considering in this paper can almost be called the prehistoric age of
municipal institutions in Northern Italy--much can be learned and much
truth inferred from the evidence of a name. But this is a species of
evidence we can never be too cautious in using, as the temptation is
always to infer too much rather than too little.
In the following pages I will try to sift the evidence obtainable,
with the impartiality of one trammeled by the support of no particular
theory; always bearing in mind, however, one fact, all-important in a
study where so much depends on nomenclature, namely, to give that
shade of meaning and that amount of weight to any term which it
possessed in the age in which it was used, carefully distinguishing
this from its use in any earlier or later age. The importance of this
caution will be soon seen when we come to discuss the origin of
corporate life in the communes, where many have been misled by
attaching to the words _respublica_ and _civitas_, for example, so
continually recurring in the old laws and charters, a meaning which
was entirely foreign to the terms at the period of their use. With
this warning, we will turn to a consideration of the first effects of
the inroad of the northern barbarians on the cities, whose exhausted
and defenseless state has already been pointed out.
One of the chief characteristics of the Teutonic tribes which overran
Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries, was an innate hatred of
cities, of enclosing walls and crowded habitations. Children of the
field and the forest, they had their village communities and their
hundreds, their common land and their allotted land, but these were
small restrictions on their free life, and left an extended
"air-space" for each individual and his immediate household. Homestead
was not too near homestead, each man being separated from his neighbor
by the extent of half the land belonging to each. The centralization
of population in city life was a thing undreamed of, and an idea
abhorred, alike for its novelty and for the violence it did to the as
yet untrained instincts of the people. The strong, independent
individualism of the Teutonic freeman rebelled against anything which
would in any way limit his freedom of action: "ne pati quidem inter se
junctas sedes," says Tacitus.[3] An agriculturist in his rude way, he
lived on the land which supported him and his family, and feeling no
further need, his untrained intelligence could form no conception of
the necessities and the advantages of the social union and
interdependence of a more civilized state of society; nor could he
comprehend the mutual relations of the individual to the immediate
community in which he lived.
He could understand his own relation to and dependence on the state as
a whole; alone he could not repel the attacks of neighboring tribes,
alone he could not go forth to conquer new lands or increase the
number of his herds. But why he should associate with others and so
limit the freedom which was his birthright, for other purposes than
those of attack and defense, of electing a leader for war, or getting
his allotment of land in peace, was altogether beyond the horizon of
his comprehension. He was sufficient unto himself for all the purposes
of his daily life; to the product of his own plough and hunting-spear
he looked for the maintenance of himself and his family, and the loose
organization which we may call the state existed simply so as to
enable him to live in comparative peace, or gain advantage in
war--perhaps the first example of the new power in state-craft which
was to revolutionize the political principles of the world; the
individual lived no longer simply to support the state, but the state
existed solely to protect and aid the individual.
If all this be true of the Teutonic nations in general, in the earlier
stages of their development, particularly true is it of the
Lombards,[4] a wild tribe of the Suevic stock, whose few appearances
in history, previous to their invasion of Italy, are connected only
with the fiercest strife and the rudest forms of barbarism. History
seems to have proved that tradition has maligned the Vandal; the Goth
can boast a ruler raised at the centre of Eastern civilization and
refinement; but the Lombard of the invasion can never appear as other
than the rude barbarian rushing from his wild northern home, and
forcing on a defenseless people the laws and the customs suited to his
own rugged nature and the unformed state of society in which he lived.
Such being the case, there is little cause for wonder that the
invading Lombard directed his fury with particular violence against
the corporate towns, whose strength was not sufficient to resist the
attacks of his invading host. Like all other Teutonic tribes the
Lombards were entirely unskilled in the art of attacking fortified
towns; hence the only mode of siege with which they were acquainted
was that of starving out the inhabitants, by cutting off all source of
supply by ravaging and destroying the surrounding country. This fact,
unimportant as it may seem at the first glance, materially affected
the whole course of the later history of some of the Italian cities.
By this means we are enabled, even at this early epoch, to divide them
into two classes. First, those cities which, after a more or less
short resistance, yielded to the rude tactics of the barbarians and
were made subject by them, for example Milan and Pavia.[5] Second,
those cities like Venice and Ravenna,[6] which, by means of a
connection with the sea which the invaders could not cut off, were
enabled to gain supplies by water, and so resist all efforts of the
besieging host to capture them. They never fell completely under the
Lombard yoke, and either retained a sort of partial autonomy or
yielded allegiance to some other power. It is the cities of the former
class that are the subject of this investigation.
The condition of these inland towns at the time of the invasion was,
as we have seen, weak in the extreme. The defenses, where they
existed, were of a character to afford little protection, and the bulk
of the inhabitants were so enervated from a life of poverty and
oppression that they were almost incapable of offering any resistance
in their own defense. They were reduced to such a condition as to be
only too grateful if their rough conquerors, after an easy victory,
disdainfully spared their lives, and left them to occupy their
dismantled dwellings.
This seems to have been the almost universal method of procedure. The
Lombards did not in any sense, at first, think of occupying the
conquered cities; for the reasons already given they despised, because
they could not yet comprehend, the life of the civilian. They
contented themselves with pulling down the walls, razing the
fortifications, and destroying every mark which would make of the city
anything but an aggregate of miserable dwellings. The inhabitants were
for the most part spared, and left to enjoy, if the term can be used
for such an existence, what the conquerors did not think worth the
having. These felt the fruits of their victory to lie in the rich
arable lands of the surrounding plains, and here they settled down,
each in his own holding, portioned out by lot to every soldier; the
town being considered but as a part of the _civitas_ or district, if I
may use the term, of the _dux_ or overlord, from whom the several
_milites_, or landholders of the surrounding territory, had their
tenure, and who himself held directly from the king.
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