200 LaCitadeSancta
ally exorcized demoniacs (even nuns, at the bishop’s request), and practiced
his trade for the glory of God.^128
TheCityMakes aSaint
Good relations between holy person and city brought mutual benefits; cities
competed to recruit possible saints. It took an apparition of the Blessed Vir-
gin and an intervention from the bishop of Lucca to end the quarrel between
Castelfranco and Castel Santa Croce over the right to construct a monastery
for Oringa Cristiana. Castel Santa Croce got the honor.^129 The communes
knew that any holy person might become a protector in heaven. After death,
the commune and neighbors promoted the cults and erected the tombs of
their divinely favored children. The parish or cathedral clergy wrote their
lives, at least until later in the thirteenth century, when mendicants came to
dominate hagiography.^130 In contrast with practice in the communal period,
however, modern canonization is a centralized process, and the making of a
saint can take decades, if not centuries.^131 The modern procedure has distinct
steps: an initiation of the process for the ‘‘servant of God,’’ approval of a
restricted cult under the title of ‘‘blessed,’’ and finally the papal canonization
itself, which declares the blessed a ‘‘saint’’ of the universal Church. The
people of communal Italy knew none of this.^132 Today public veneration of
an uncanonized saint will block a papal canonization. The people of the
communes created their saints by acclamation. The public cult came first,
and it made the saint.
When the Dominicans buried Margherita of Citta`di Castello, they could
not do so in the cloister, because the people demanded that her tomb be
accessible in the church—they already considered her a saint and treated
her as such.^133 When Francesco Patrizzi’s Servite brothers intoned the open-
ing chant of his funeral Mass, the congregation shouted down the choir and
demanded instead the chants for the feast of a confessor. The friars obliged
and sang the introit ‘‘Gaudemus in Domino’’ instead of ‘‘Requiem Aeter-
nam.’’ From that day forward, Francesco was a saint.^134 Not all clerics were
so cooperative. When the founder of the Dominicans died at Bologna, the
friars buried him in an unmarked grave. Within days, the laity starting show-
ing up to honor ‘‘Saint’’ Dominic’s tomb with flowers and candles and to
- Ibid., 29 – 31 ; for his exorcism by blessed bread, seeVita Beati Facii, 44 – 45 (Miraculum 5 ).
129 .Legenda Beatae Christianae, 22 , pp. 205 ; see also the deed for the house: ibid., pp. 285 – 89. - Vauchez, ‘‘Nouveaute ́,’’ 76.
- On the shift from episcopal to papal control of canonizations, see Herrmann-Mascard,Reliques
des saints, 87 – 105. - On saints’ cults, see Sofia Boesch Gajano,Agiografia altomedievale(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976 ), and
the bibliographical and methodological update in ead., ‘‘Il culto dei santi,’’ 119 – 36 ; and Golinelli,Citta`e
culto. On the ‘‘canonization’’ of lay saints, see, above all, Vauchez, ‘‘Between Church and City,’’Laity in
the Middle Ages, 67 – 72.
133 .Legenda B. Margaritae de Castello, 24 ,p. 126. - Cristoforo of Parma,Legenda Beati Francisci, 32 ,p. 187.