76 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)that infl icted a decisive defeat onto Frederick’s imperial forces at the Battle
of Legnano in 1176.
In 1183, a full peace arrangement was concluded at Constance. Th e cit-
ies received three major concessions from the emperor: the election of their
own magistrates, rights of government over adjacent rural counties, and the
right to make their own laws. In other words, they were conceded internal
autonomy. In return, the cities made a number of promises to Frederick. Th e
citizens of the cities would swear loyalty to him. Magistrates, though chosen
by the communes themselves, would be offi cially invested in their offi ces by
imperial offi cials. For legal cases where the amount at stake was above a
certain fi gure (twenty- fi ve pounds in gold), there would be a right of appeal
to imperial courts. Finally, the cities agreed to pay a levy when emperors
traveled through them en route to their coronations in Rome. In practice,
the rights gained were claimed by all of the communes in Italy and not
merely by the ones represented at the conference. Also, the rights conceded
to the emperor were, in practice, largely ignored, with the result that the
communes emerged as the clear victors in the struggle.
Making coherent legal sense of this new development posed a challenge
to even the subtlest of legal minds. Bartolus of Sassoferrato made a valiant
attempt at it. He was certainly well placed to craft a conceptual compromise
on this issue. He was a spokesman for universal de jure rule of the emperors
and a sometime legal adviser to Emperor Charles IV— but also a con sul tant
to some of the Italian cities. His solution was to posit the idea of an in de pen-
dent city, which he called a civitas. Th e essence of its in de pen dence lay in the
fact that it acknowledged no superior—civitas civi princeps (“the city its own
prince”) in the succinct expression that he coined.
Th ere were, however, two vital caveats to this in de pen dence. One was that
the cities still remained part of the Holy Roman Empire. Th e second was
that the emperor must be regarded as the ultimate source of the powers
of the city. Th e result, then, was that the cities were held to possess their
trea sured “in de pen dence” by imperial consent, as a kind of emanation from
the emperor. In de pen dence, in this very special sense, meant that the em-
peror refrained from exercising his imperial powers in the cities. Another
way of putting it was to say that the emperor was the ruler of the Holy Ro-
man Empire as a whole, but without being the ruler of all of its individual
component parts.