under the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire during the High Middle
Ages. By the late twelfth century, these city-states had evolved a distinctive
form of political life centered on an elected oYcial known as thepodesta`
(from the Latinpotestas, meaning ‘‘power’’), and had begun to assert their
independence from imperial rule. 5 During the thirteenth century, their argu-
ments for self-government tended to be couched in the traditional language
of the Roman civil law, which had also served as the legal basis for the
Emperor’s claim on the Italian cities. But the end of the thirteenth century
witnessed the rise of a powerful new cultural force: a fascination with the
ancientstudia humanitatis, 6 now known as humanism, swept through Euro-
pean universities and brought with it a deep reverence for ancient Roman
history, poetry, and moral and political philosophy. 7 By this time, most of the
Italian city-states had abandoned their system of elective self-government in
favor of more conventional, hereditarysignori(Pisa, Mantua, and Verona are
good examples), but two important exceptions remained: Venice and Flor-
ence. 8 Defenders of these two cities used their Roman sources to construct a
case for the inherent superiority of popular self-government, drawing freely
from the ancient poets, historians, and statesmen as they went.
Perhaps the most famous early example of such an exercise is theLaudatio
Xorentinae urbis(‘‘Panegyric of the City of Florence’’) of Leonardo Bruni.
Although not a Florentine himself (he was born in the city of Arezzo),
Bruni had made Florence his adoptive home, and in 1404 —the probable
date of the composition of theLaudatio—he was conducting a campaign
to replace Coluccio Salutati as chancellor of the republic (Hankins
2000 , 143 – 78 ). In a formal sense, theLaudatiois based on thePanathenaicus,
an oration by the second-century Greek rhetorician Aelius Aristides.
But the reader is left in no doubt as to the true direction of Bruni’s
thoughts. WeWrst read that Florence is to be praised on account of its
glory, manifested in its ‘‘power and wealth’’ (Bruni 1996 , 570 ). The ultimate
source of thisgrandezzais Florence’s founder: Rome. As Bruni writes, ‘‘Your
5 As early as the eleventh century, in fact, the Italian communes had begun to appoint their own
‘‘consuls.’’ On this development, see Jones ( 1997 , 130 – 51 ).
6 The term was coined by Cicero, although substantially redeWned in this context by Coluccio
Salutati. On the rise of humanism, see Witt ( 2000 ).
7 Paul Oskar Kristeller famously deWned the humanists as ‘‘essentially rhetoricians and heirs to the
tradition of the medievaldictatores’’ who began to use classical sources as models for their composi-
tions. See Kristeller ( 1944 – 5 , 346 – 74 ); cf. Skinner ( 2002 , vol. 2 , 10 – 38 ).
8 Two smaller cities, Lucca and Siena, also maintained their republican forms of government
(intermittently in the case of Lucca).
198 eric nelson