HolyPersons andHolyPlaces 191
the most important traits of sanctity were patience and humility in the com-
pany of family and neighbors. Extravagance might even bring suspicion. A
band of youths (brigata di fanciuli) once took to harassing Pietro Pettinaio (d.
1289 ), the combmaker saint of Siena, chanting songs about his being a sor-
cerer. The marvelous, after all, could have diabolical origins. When Pietro
tamed the boys by his mildness, they started praising him as a saint. Now,
that was really bad. He ran off in horror—better to be maligned than to be
singled out as the object of a cult.^67
The surest holiness was ordinary and useful. Raimondo Palmerio of Pia-
cenza, the pilgrim and penitent, was married and had five children. His
reputation for sanctity came from his humility and from his founding a poor
house (xenodochia) near the church of the Dodici Apostoli at Piacenza.^68 Omo-
bono of Cremona ( 1117 ?– 1197 ), born into a family of merchants, married and
practiced the trade of a tailor. Only the intensity of his prayer life and occa-
sional extravagant almsgiving—for which his wife regularly chastised him—
marked him out from his neighbors. Like Pietro Pettinaio, he won
admiration and respect for his humility. So trusted was he that the city of
Cremona called on him to mediate between feuding factions. After Omo-
bono’s death, his bishop, Sicardo of Cremona, went to Rome in person as a
representative of the city to request that Pope Innocent III canonize the holy
tailor.^69 Innocent emphasized three elements of Omobono’s holiness in his
bull of canonization: his devotion to Mass and Office, his almsgiving, and
his work for peace among his fellow citizens. The pope did not try to hide
Omobono’s distinctively lay and civic-minded piety. His late-thirteenth-cen-
tury biographer also praised Omobono’s honesty in business, thereby recap-
turing an aspect of his piety missed by the pontiff but prized in the workaday
world of the communes.^70
Biographers of the communal saints emphasized their subjects’ ortho-
doxy, perhaps because they often came from trades, like textiles and leather-
working, with a reputation for heresy.^71 Omobono’s biographer contrasted
his orthodoxy with general practice in the ‘‘heretical city’’ of Cremona in his
- Pietro of Monterone,Vita del beato Pietro Pettinajo, 10 , pp. 114 – 15.
- Rufino of Piacenza,Vita et Miracula B. Raymundi.
- As he tells us in his chronicle: Sicardo of Cremona,Chronica, MGH.SS 31 : 176.
70 .Vita Sancti Homoboni,ed. Francesco Saverio Gatta, in Francesco Saverio Gatta, ‘‘Un antico codice
reggiano su Omobono il ‘santo populare’ di Cremona,’’Bollettino storico cremonese 7 ( 1942 ): 111. His charity
earned him the nickname ‘‘pater pauperum’’: ibid., 112. On his mediating role, see F. S. Gatta, ‘‘Un
antico codice,’’ 108 ; he was never a member of the Humiliati:Vita di s. Omobono,ed. Giuseppe Bertoni, in
‘‘Di una vita di s. Omobono del secoloxiv,’’Bollettino storico cremonese 3 ( 1938 ): 174 – 75. On the ways he
was portrayed by his medieval hagiographers, see Andre ́Vauchez, ‘‘Le ‘trafiquant ce ́leste’: Saint Ho-
mebon de Cre ́mone ( 1197 ), marchand et ‘pe`re des pauvres,’ ’’Mentalite ́s et socie ́te ́s,vol. 1 ofHorizons
marins, itine ́raires spirituels (ve–xviiie),ed. Henri Dudois, Jean-Claude Hocquet, and Andre ́Vauchez (Paris:
Sorbonne, 1987 ), 115 – 22 , who notes this life’s bourgeois quality, in comparison to the earlier (unpublished)
vita, which emphasizes asceticism: ibid., 118. On Saint Omobono, see Vauchez,Laity in the Middle Ages,
55 – 56. - As suggested by Vauchez,Laity in the Middle Ages, 59.