TheHolyCity 105
bishop. Soon communal and episcopal mobs fought in the streets, torching
each other’s houses. But the strife represented political factionalism, not a
conflict between clergy and laity.^11
Other bishops were less hesitant to cooperate. The bishop was the one
leader who could represent the local society before both emperor and pope.
If cooperative, he was the early commune’s natural leader.^12 In the 1100 s
bishops remodeled their residences and began to call thempalazzi(palaces).
The first communal governments met in these new buildings rather than
build their own.^13 So, communal governments developed in physical proxim-
ity to the bishop’s court, orcuria.^14 For the lay theologian and lawyer Alber-
tano of Brescia, ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘secular,’’ though distinguished in theory,
were an integrated whole.^15 At the end of imperial rule, cathedral canons
began to elect local men to the bishopric. These bishops-elect belonged to
the same class that dominated the early communes; they were local men.
The Bolognese election of bishop Girardo to the communal office was natu-
ral.^16 At Pisa and Milan arose a judicial interpenetration of ecclesiastical and
civil functions that seems strange for a post-Gregorian age. Bishops heard
civil cases, and city courts gave decisions on tithes—with little complaint
about conflict of jurisdiction. Even in cities with less cooperation than Milan
or Pisa, use of the ordeal in criminal courts, a practice only abolished in 1215
by the Lateran Council, demanded a bishop’s presence to bless the hot iron
or cold water.^17 The sorting out of ecclesiastical and civil functions would
wait until the mid- 1200 s.^18
Only after a riot burned the inquisition offices at Parma in 1278 , resulting
in a papal interdict, did that city enact truly punitive legislation against the
clergy. Parma prohibited gifts of real property to clerics, seized the property
of those who became clerics, and imposed penalties on those who dared to
take civil cases to Church courts.^19 But such overt hostility was rare, and this
was an unusual case. More commonly, secular and ecclesiastical authorities
cooperated in communal governance throughout most of the mid–thirteenth
century. In 1237 , the Franciscan bishop of Milan, Leo de’ Valvassori of Per-
ego, represented the city in negotiations with the emperor Frederick at Lodi.
At the same meeting, Piacenza was represented by its Cistercian bishop,
Dom Egidio, and its Dominican prior, Fra Giacomo.^20 Cities regularly culti-
11 .CCB:A, Bol., Vill. ( 1193 ), 56 ; Alfred Hessel,Storia della citta`di Bologna, 1116 – 1280 ,ed. Gina Fasoli
(Bologna: ALFA, 1975 ), 74 – 77.
12. So Hyde,Society and Politics, 58.
13. Or in the cathedral complexes, as they did in Milan and Pisa: Gabriella Rossetti, ‘‘Le istituzioni
comunali a Milano nelxiisecolo,’’Atti dell’ 11 oCongresso, 85.
14. Miller,Bishop’s Palace, 96 , 118 – 19.
15. Powell,Albertanus, 75.
16 .CCB:A, B, Vill., Bol. ( 1187 ), 49.
17. For these rites, seeManuale Ambrosianum, 2 : 492 – 97.
18. On this unity, see Hyde,Society and Politics, 99.
19. Parma Stat.ii( 1282 ), 211 – 13 , 220 – 22.
20. Muzio of Modena,Annales Placentini Gibellini,ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz ( 1237 ),MGH.SS 18 : 477 – 78.