TheMotherChurch 47
complain to Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini about court fees.^195 The
bishop’s court sometimes poached on the turf of the secular courts, bringing
spates of jurisdictional conflict.^196 The bishop’s court was a part of his house-
hold. When in town he almost lived above the shop—or close enough to it
to give credence to an early-fourteenth-century Italian tale in which a parish
priest, Pievano Porcellino, takes advantage of the proximity to extort a favor-
able decision from his disreputable bishop, Giovanni de’ Mangiadori of Flor-
ence ( 1251 – 74 ). The wily Porcellino (accused of unchastity) sneaks from the
courtroom directly into the bishop’s bedchamber and finds him with a
woman. The bishop lets him off.^197 One can understand why even saintly
Bishop Giacomo Buoncambio preferred his residence at Massimatico over
the busy episcopal palace in Bologna.
The bishop might come from elsewhere, but the core of his community,
orfamilia,was the college of cathedral canons. These clerics were, sometimes
by city law, hometown men.^198 They were the repository of the Mother
Church’s traditions. They were its tangible link to the city, its people, its
past, and its identity. They acquired this status in the precommunal period,
when bishops were often appointed by the distant German emperors.^199 The
canons, in a sense, ‘‘owned’’ the cathedral, or at least their part of it, the
choir.^200 They were a small elite group, with all the conscious identity of a
private corporation. Parma in 1230 had 17 canons; Padua in 1297 , 21 ; Ferrara
in 1300 , 18 ; Vicenza in 1297 , 17.^201 Bologna in the thirteenth century counted
between 12 and 15 canons. Bolognese cathedral canons’ papal tithe assess-
ments were in the range of those for wealthier city chaplains, between 30
and 50 s. bon. The archdeacon was assessed at £ 5 , the bishop at £ 150. So,
although well-off, the canons, like their bishop, were not men of dispropor-
tionate wealth.^202
Like those of the canons in collegiate churches, the duties of the cathedral
canons were principally liturgical. They formed the bishop’s splendid entou-
rage when he celebrated the great feasts of the year. When Don Galdo, the
dean of San Vincenzo in Bergamo, described the primary duties of the can-
ons and bishop, he named their celebration of the great feasts of Christmas
and its octave, Epiphany, Saint Vincent (the cathedral patron), Palm Sun-
day, Easter, Ascension, Saint John the Baptist, and the ‘‘other solemn
- Pisa Stat.i( 1286 ), Popolo 74 , pp. 596 – 604.
- Bologna Stat.i( 1259 – 60 ), 11. 94 , 3 : 341 – 42 , reasserts city tribunal jurisdiction over real estate.
197 .Novellino,ed. Cesare Segre, 54 ,La prosa del duecento,La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, 3 (Milan:
Ricciardi, 1959 ), 840 – 41. - Bologna Stat.i( 1250 ), 7. 135 , 2 : 140.
- Miller,Bishop’s Palace, 85.
- Ibid., 219 , suggests that construction of private episcopal chapels in the late 1100 s resulted from
the canons’ dominance in the duomo. - Rat. Dec. Aem. (Parma, 1230 ), 328 ; Rat. Dec. Ven. (Padua, 1297 ), 105 – 9 ; Rat. Dec. Aem. (Fer-
rara, 1300 ), 43 – 44 ; Rat. Dec. Ven. (Vicenza, 1297 ), 215 – 25. - Sella, ‘‘Diocesi di Bologna,’’ 107 – 8 ; cf. Fanti, ‘‘Sulla costituzione,’’ 116.