Introduction 5
that it did not occur there; indeed, south Italian cities were quite different in
their ecclesiastical, commercial, and political forms.^19 So, too, only in the
region studied in this book did medieval cities construct great new monu-
mental baptisteries for their Easter rites. This special focus of city religious
life on the cathedral complex also distinguishes the religion of the large com-
munes from the Italian countryside—where such consolidation was impos-
sible.
Within north-central Italy, I focus principally on those cities that achieved
practical autonomy during the twelfth-century struggles against German im-
perial rule. This means that I have little to say about Venice, so unique in
many ways, or the cities in the States of the Church, with their unique
relations to their nearby papal sovereign. At the risk of anachronism—for
even today Italy is a land of fierce regionalism—I call, as a shorthand, the
citizens of these cities ‘‘Italians.’’ Although they certainly thought of them-
selves first of all as Florentines or Bolognese, Milanese or Sienese, these
communes had marked cultural and political similarity, and they themselves
had already begun to use the adjectiveitalianito distinguish themselves from
their would-be German overlords.^20
Chronological divisions, like those I have chosen, are always arbitrary,
but mine provide a reasonable framework for the age of the republican city-
states of Italy.^21 In 1125 , the emperor Henry V died; two hundred years
later, only two of the northern communes, Padua and Parma, still enjoyed
republican independence. In 1328 , they too fell into the hands of seignorial
families, the della Scala and the Rossi. Henry’s death signaled the decline of
imperial power in the north and the establishment of independent govern-
ments, a process complete by 1140. Already before the fall of Padua and
Parma, the age of princes had arrived and the republican era was gone. In
Tuscany, as at Venice and Genoa, republican forms continued on, but these
cities became oligarchies, having little in common with the popular com-
munes of the 1200 s. Ruling groups always employ public ceremony for their
own purposes. The ritual world of late medieval Florence, so provocatively
described by Richard Trexler, with its aristocratic flavor evocative of the
Medici princes, feels quite different from that of the high medieval com-
munes.^22 I suspect that the rise of princes and oligarchies lies behind this
change, although this is still a conjecture waiting for another book to confirm
it.
The first five chapters of this book map the religious and civic ‘‘geogra-
phy’’ of the city-states. The first sketches the republics’ ecclesiastical institu-
tions and their relation to civic identity. The bishop, the cathedral, and the
diocese predated the commune, and they outlived it. Historians have given
19. See Jones,Italian City-State, 262 , on the contrasts between north and south.
20. See ibid., 478.
21. As in Hyde,Society and Politics, 59 , 146.
22. SeePublic Life in Renaissance Florence(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 ), esp. 549 – 53.