TheMotherChurch 37
chapel clergy. The consortia each met in a major church or monastery of
the quarter: San Prospero, San Donato, San Procolo, or Santo Stefano. The
clergy within the walls had founded these consortia themselves, so they did
not include priests from the suburbs. Each quarter took a distinct religious
identity from its patrons. On the feast of a chapel patron, priests and laity of
the quarter gathered for the services at that church. Outside the city walls,
the suburbs of Bologna contained four ‘‘pievi’’ (plebatus) containing fifty-one
chapels. These pievi were not independent baptismal churches; they all per-
tained to the ‘‘pieve of Bologna’’; that is to say, their Mother Church was
the duomo itself.^127 In the contado were another 535 chapels and altars, all
but fifteen grouped into forty-two pievi, each under a rural baptismal
church.^128 The chapels within the walls, the ones whose priests formed the
consortia, numbered seventy-one. If the tithe assessed is any indication of
chapel size, this varied considerably: some chapels paid as little as 10 s. bon.,
while Sant’Ambrogio in the consortium of San Procolo, at £ 10 , paid most.
A typical tithe was between 20 s. and 50 s.^129
City churches showed considerable variety in organization. Ferrara never
completely abolished multiple baptismal fonts, in spite of Bishop Landolfo’s
decrees and his canons’ legal efforts. In the Romagna the cities were small
and did not flourish politically.^130 There the smaller communes of Imola,
Forlı`, Forlimpopoli, and Ravenna all had more than one urban pieve. Bolo-
gna may have been exceptional in the degree to which its cathedral domi-
nated the liturgical life of the commune, but evidence at Padua and Parma
suggests that Bologna was more typical of communal Italy than little Forlı`.
Besides, Ferrara, dominated throughout the 1200 s by the Este family, never
really developed a mature republican regime.^131
Everywhere within the walls neighborhood chapels lay thick, very thick,
on the ground. To pass from one to another was to walk only a couple of
blocks. Until the earlier 1200 s lay attachment to a neighborhood chapel was
tenuous and boundaries fluid. At Florence in 1202 , a dispute over chapel
boundaries might be resolved by placing the men in one chapel and the
women in the other.^132 But within a generation, the network of chapels
reached its final form. By the 1250 s, families had been attending the same
chapel for at least two generations and in so doing become part of a small
- Sella, ‘‘Diocesi di Bologna,’’ 116 – 19 ; Fanti, ‘‘Sulla costituzione,’’ 113 – 14 , shows that these suburbs
all belonged to the ‘‘Plebs Sancti Petri Episcopatus,’’ that is, to the duomo. In 1315 the cathedral had
over 150 subordinate chapels. - Sella, ‘‘Diocesi di Bologna,’’ 119 – 54.
- Ibid., 107 – 11 ; for Sant’Ambrogio, see ibid., 111.
- Vasina, ‘‘Pievi e parrocchie,’’ 738 – 39.
- See Lodovico Antonio Muratori,Delle antichita`estensi ed italiane(Modena: Ducale, 1717 ), 1 : 389 – 90 ,
for the 1208 municipal law making Azzo IV d’Este ‘‘rector’’ and ‘‘dominus perpetuus’’ of the city; on the
Este signoria, albeit later, see Trevor Dean,Land and Power in Late Medieval Ferrara: The Rule of the Este,
1350 – 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ). - Trexler,Public Life, 13.