Chapter Five
Holy Persons and Holy Places
A Christian society produces saints after its own image of holiness. Commu-
nal Italy was no exception. The city made the saints. Citizens found their
saints, not in the monastic or clerical world of churchmen, but among them-
selves, the lay faithful. Recognizing holiness, they canonized it themselves,
calling on the pope or hierarchy only rarely to ratify their perception. The
religiosity of the period’s holy persons—its saints—was really that of the city
and Mother Church, albeit lived more intensely.^1 Although not wholly typi-
cal of ordinary lay piety by their very exceptional behavior and styles of life,
the saints and their cults were a fixture of communal cities. Our spiritual
geography of the Italian republics would be incomplete without them.
The twelfth-century cities found their saints among the spiritual fathers of
the Mother Church, but these were bishops with a difference. They de-
fended both true religion and the independence of their cities. Bishop
Ubaldo of Gubbio (d. 1160 ) uttered prayers from the walls of his besieged
city and set enemy armies to flight. This, with his many works of charity,
inspired outpourings of devotion. Soon after Ubaldo’s death, his successor,
Bishop Teobaldo, and another contemporary, Giordano of Citta`di Castello,
celebrated the good bishop in Latin and vernacular lives.^2 Northern com-
munes also chose bishops as city patrons, as the Mantuans did with Anselm
of Lucca, who was not their bishop but merely spent some time there while
in exile.^3 The good communal bishop supported communal independence
- So Richard Kieckhefer, ‘‘Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval
Male Saints,’’Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe,ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 ), 288 – 305 ; and on the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of the communal saints, see
Golinelli,Citta`e culto, 84 – 87. - Franc ̧ois Bolbeau, ‘‘La vita di sant’Ubaldo,’’Bollettino della Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria 74
( 1977 ): 81 – 82. For Teobaldo’s vita, seeAS 16 (Mayiii), 630 – 37. - On early Mantuan communal cults, see Golinelli, ‘‘Dal santo,’’ 12 – 24.