136 LaCitadeSancta
Popolo, the feel of a religious confraternity is again marked.^240 Could the
explanation lie in the Armi’s particular role in Bolognese communal life?
They formed the militia. The militia was the city’s strong arm but also its
spiritual heart. The Armi, not the Arti, defended the Ecclesia Matrix, the
carroccio, Saint Petronio, and his city. The craft guilds at Padua and Pisa
had the same defensive task. They formed the militia. They, with the help
of the city’s patrons, defended the city in battle and so shared the city’s
sacred character. Their statutes reflect their simultaneously religious and
civic nature.
TheHolyCityLegislates
At no time were the communes secular in the modern sense. But before the
rise of the Popolo, Italian city statutes are oddly lacking in religious refer-
ences. The early commune at Ferrara sanctified its city statutes by carving
them into the wall of the cathedral, but those laws lack religious content.
The same is true elsewhere. At Pisa, the only overtly religious passage in the
statutes of 1162 comes in the consuls’ oath, where these officers swear to
protect the honor of the Mother Church and other religious institutions.^241
The 1162 statutes are fragments, but those of 1233 , for which we have more
complete texts, are equally lacking in religious references.^242 God intrudes
into the early-thirteenth-century statutes of Treviso only in the requirement
that city officials take their oaths on the Gospels; the saints appear only in
the use of their feasts for dating.^243 Milan’s earliest extant statutes are wholly
nonreligious, tithes being the only ecclesiastical matter mentioned.^244 But
religion was not alien to the early communes. They were formed within the
episcopal curia; they met in sacred spaces; they replaced the emperor with
new patron saints. The fathers felt no need to proclaim their faith when
legislating on roads, drains, taxes, and court procedure. The rise of the popu-
lar communes brought a sea change in legal rhetoric. This was the age when
the cities built their palazzi and established civil courts and administration
consciously distinct from that of the bishop and the Mother Church.^245 As
communes developed a more purely ‘‘lay’’ government and housed it in new
- See the notaries’ statutes in Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria,ms 1359,Ordinamenta [Fratalie Notari-
orum Vicentinorum, 1272 – 1304 ]. They treat candle offerings (fols. 3 r–v); vigil lamps (fol. 3 v); monthly and
annual meetings—calledcapitoloandcapitolo generale(fols. 3 v– 4 r); funerals (fol. 17 v). The group had about
five hundred members, according to the matricula, fols. 58 r– 68 v. These statutes are also found in Vicenza,
Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana,mss 533– 34. - Pisa Stat.i( 1162 ), p. 3 ; Pisa Stat.ii( 1313 ), 1. 1 ,p. 11.
- Pisa Stat.i( 1233 – 81 ), pp. 643 – 1026.
- Treviso Stat. ( 1207 – 18 ), 1 : 3 – 147 ;( 1207 ), 50 , 1 : 42 – 52 ;( 1211 ), 199 , 1 : 121 – 22 (dating by saints’ feasts).
Early Volterra statutes mention only God and the Virgin: Volterra Stat., 233 – 37 , pp. 224 – 32. - Milan,Liber Consuetudinum Mediolani Annimccxvi,ed. Giulio Porro Labertenghi, Historiae Patriae
Monumenta 16 : Leges Municipales 2 : 1 (Turin: Regius, 1876 ), cols. 859 – 960 ; cols. 926 – 36 on tithes. This
text is also edited in Enrico Besta and Gianluigi Barni,Liber Consuetudinum Mediolani Annimccxvi(Milan:
Zappa, 1945 ). - On these building projects, see Jones,Italian City-State, 442.