City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy

City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy Edited by ANTHONY MOLHO KURT RAAUB JULIAEMLEN

An Arbor The University of Michigan Press

Proceedings of a conference sponsored by Brown University's Thomas J. Watson Jr. InstitUle for International Studies

Distribution in al of Europe (mcluding the U.K.) by Franz Steiner Verlag. Stuttgart

Copyright@ 1991 by Franz Steiner Verlag

Al rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press 1994

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1992

1991

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library of Congres Cataloging-in Publication Data applied for T�1\N 0-47' 1 (l'R�_Q

Contents Acknowledgements

8

Editors' Preface

9

Introductory Remarks: Max Weber's "The City" Revisited,

19

Wilfried Nippel PART I CONSCIOUSNESS AND REPRESENTATION Reflections of the Greek City on Unity and Division, Nicole Rome: The History of an Anachronism, The City and the "New" Saints,

Loraux

Timothy J. Cornell

53

Chiara Frugoni

71

City and Citizen: Changing Perceptions in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Alison Brown Commentary:

33

Carmine Ampolo

93 113 121

Giovanni Ciappelli PART II CITIZENS AND THE POLITICAL CLASSES Norms of Citizenship in Ancient Greece,

David Whitehead

135

The Legal Definition of Citizenship in the Late Middle Ages,

155

D iego Quaglioni Who Rules? Power and Participation in Athens and Rome, The Rulers of Florence, 1282-1530,

Walter Eder 169 197

David Herlihy

From Social to Political Representation in Renaissance Florence,

223

Riccardo Fubini Commentary:

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber

241

PART III POLITICS AND CONFLICT The Exercise of Power in the Roman Republic,

Erich S. Gruen

The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics, John M.

Najemy

A Typology of Social Conflict in Greek Poleis, Th omas J.

Figueira

251 269 289

Social Structure and Conflict in the Medieval City, Giorgio Cracco

309

Commentary:

Harry W. Pleket

331

Ronald F. Weissman

345

PART IV URBAN AND A RCHITECTURAL FORMS The City of Athens: Space, Symbol, Structure, Tonio Holscher

355

Urban Development in Ancient Rome and the Impact of Empire, L. Richardson jr

381

Civic Urbanism in Medieval Florence, Franek Sznura

403

Urbanism in Medieval Venice, Juergen Schulz

419

Commentary:

447 453

Edmond Frezouls James Ackerman

PART V S YMBOLS AND RITUALS Symbols and Rituals in Classical Athens, Adalberto Giovannini

459

From Violence to Blessing: Symbols and Rituals in Ancient Rome,

479

Keith Hopkins Symbols and Rituals in Florence, Franco Cardini

499

The Self-Definition of the Venetian Republic, Patricia Fortini Brown

511

Commentary:

549 555

Glen W. Bowersock Marino Berengo

PART VI TERRITORY, EXTERNAL RELAT IONS AND EMPIRE City-State, Territory and Empire in Classical Antiquity, Kurt Raaflaub

565

The Italian City-State and Its Territory, Giorgio Chittolini

589

Diplomacy in the Italian City-State, James S. Grubb

603

Commentary:

619 627

Hartmut Galsterer Anthony Molho

Concluding Reflections, Guido Clemente

641

Index

649

To Our Colleagues in the Department of Classics and the Department of History, Brown University, most especially to the memory of David Herlihy

Acknowledgements

EVERAL

PEOPLE contributed generously to the realization of this volume, and of the symposium on which it is based. Without the material support of Artemis A. W. and Martha Joukowsky and of Jim Twadell, it is unlikely that either the symposium could have taken place or the book could have been published. We are profoundly grateful to them for their enlightened patronage. The Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at our University offered us its institutional sponsorship. Our colleague and good friend, Abbott Gleason, associate director of the Institute at the time of this project's inception, enthusiastically endorsed our proposal. His successors, P. Terrence Hopman, and the current director of the Institute, Howard R. Swearer, continued their support and greatly facilitated the realization of this undertaking. We received much valuable assistance from Joanna Drell, Patricia Henry, Melissa Marshall, and Ruthann Whitten. Andrew Gilmartin, Allen Renear, Geoffrey Bilder, and Claire Durst provided helpful programming advice, and Dalia Geffen much useful editorial help. Our special thanks go to Cherrie Guerzon, secretary and assistant extraordinaire, without whose help the type­ script of this book could not have been completed on time. In particular we wish to recognize the critical assistance of Patricia Arney whose proofreading and indexing during the final stages of manuscript preparation lent the volume much of its cohesiveness. We are also very grateful to Professor James Ackerman and to Dott. Giovanni Ciappelli for· having agreed to step in and fill gaps created by the inability of two colleagues to submit to us the written versions of the comments they had read in the course of the conference. Neither Ackerman nor Ciappelli attended the conference; both wrote their observations without benefit of the discussions held there. Ackerman's and Ciappelli's comments arrived while the preparation of the final version of this manuscript was well advanced; as a result, authors of the papers to which these comments are addressed did not have a chance to take into account points made in the two commentaries. Finally, we relied heavily on the patience and help of our colleagues in the Department ofClassics and theDepartment of History. To them, we dedicate this volume in acknowledgement of their longstanding friendship and support.

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Editors' Preface

HE

ANCIENT CITY (Greek, "polis") gives us our words for "politics," "politicians," and, in what may seem a contrary sense, "polite." The city (Latin, "civitas") also gives us our word for "civilization." And no cities of the world have informed those terms more than Athens and Rome in antiquity, and Florence and Venice in the late Middle Ages. Athens and Rome were exceptional cities, not only in size and achievement. Yet both started out as typical poleis, "city-states," and shared with hundreds of others many characteristics, both in structure and development.1 The polis usually was a community with an urban political and religious center and a limited territory cultivated by its citizen owners. As a type of community , the polis emerged in the archaic period (eighth to sixth century B.C. ) in Greece, Etruria and other parts of Italy, and (possibly slightly earlier) in Phoenicia; in the "age of colonization" (circa 750-550 B.C. ) it spread rapidly along the coastal areas of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It seems that in their early histories, many of these poleis experienced similar crises of growth. Exclusive aristocracies first domi­ nated, but with time their power eroded. The political system that replaced the rule of the few admitted the responsible participation of larger segments of the citizen body. In a long and difficult process that often was punctuated by a sequence of violent conflicts and compromises, increasing numbers of nonaristocratic citizens -at least those who qualified for military service in the heavily armed infantry (hoplites) -were integrated into the political community and shared important citizens' rights. In the archaic period, the results of this common process of social and political struggle and of transformation and integration provided a crucial premise for some of the . truly remarkable achievements that characterize the classical ages ofAthens and Rome. In tum, these achievements set these two cities

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1. Fo r the view that early Rome, despite significant differences, in all important respects fits the typology of the polis as we can reconstruct it from the beter known Greek examples, see Kurt A. Raaflaub, in Social Conflicts (n. 3) 30 35; id., in Eder, Staat unil Staatlichkeit (n. 3) 512lS.

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Preface

apart from other classical poleis.2 It is not too much to say that the changes it underwent in the sixth century equipped Athens to withstand the historic challenge of the Persian Wars (490-480/79 B.C.), subsequendy to acquire do­ minion over the first empire ruled by a city-state in the Graeco-Roman world, and to create, in democracy, a political system that stimulated a unique level of citizen involvement in communal affairs. For all its shortcomings, it gained the admiration, though not always the approval, of political thinkers and leaders in the intervening almost 2,500 years. The century of these political developments produced many of the political values (such as liberty and equality) and the constitutional terminology that have shaped political discourse ever since.It also wimessed the cultural brilliance of fifth-century Athens that bestowed on posterity the genres of tragedy, comedy, historiography, and rhetoric, classical architecture and sculpture, the foundations of philosophy and of pedagogy as well as the beginnings of political theory. The "Periclean decades" represent one of the densest, most optimistic, and most influential periods of political and cultural achievement in world history. In its early development, particularly during the first centuries of the Republic, Rome experienced a not dissimilar "struggle of the orders" between the patrician aristocracy and the nonaristocratic plebeians (traditionally 494-287 B.C.). The successful resolution of this conflict gave Rome the internal strength and cohesion it needed as it embarked on its extraordinary conquests ofItaly and the entire Mediterranean basin. Thereby Rome was able to build an empire that lasted longer than any other in Western history, and to achieve the cultural brilliance of the age of Cicero, Vergi� and Augustus- not to speak of the political and cultural unification of the Mediterranean world and adjacent areas in the centuries of the pax Augusta. This unification, as is well known, had an enor­ mous impact on Western civilization. While the historical significance of the ancient city-states cannot be ques­ tioned, there is much about their histories that is paradoxical and difficult to understand. To mention just one major issue, down to the conquest of Greece by Philip II of Macedon in 338 B.C., the polis remained the politically leading and culturally dominant type of state in Greece. Even in its greatest days of political and cultural dynamism, Athens remained a polis, exploiting to the utmost the strengths and eventually foundering because of the weaknesses and limitations of this form of community. Rome, by contrast, very early in its imperial expansion exceeded the limitations in size of territory and population that by any definition were typical of a polis and necessary for its functioning. Yet in its internal structure, patterns of behavior and rule, ideology and self-perception, 2. This elementary historical fact is inevitably reflected in the distribution of, and perspective predominant in, our sources as much as we might regret the limitations and potential erors imposed on our historical understanding and judgment by the traditionally narrow focus on these two exceptional cities. For a recent effort at correcting such one-sidedness, apart from many boks written on the histories of individual cities (such as Corinth, Megara, Argos, Samos, and, of course, Sparta), se Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Jenseits von A then and Spart4. Das Dritte Griechenland 14nd seine StaterJwelt (Munich: Beck, 1986) . -

Preface

11

Rome remained a city-state - thereby creating the paradox of an enormous empire being ruled, not really by a city-state, but by a power maintaining in many respects the structures of a city-state and governed by an elite that retained the mentality characteristic of a city-state. To a large extent, it is precisely the consequences of this paradox that eventually caused the failure of the Roman Republic. Alongside this paradox, there are other questions about the histories of these city-states that remain obscure. Their development, structure, and functioning, particularly in the early and formative stages of their history, are only partially understood; so are the domestic conflicts and compromises from which emerged the well-integrated communities of the classical periods of Greece and Rome. To a large extent, this difculty is due to the scarcity of sources. Particularly in the case of Rome, contemporary and specific evidence is lacking almost completely, and the picture drawn by more detailed sources that were written many centuries later is in many ways greatly distorted.3 The cities of late medieval Italy, on the other hand, are comparatively well illuminated. Their libraries and archives contain some of the richest and most remarkably complete sets of historical sources available for any pre-modern European societies. These sources show that the development of the communes was also marked by intense political conflicts, and that these tensions crucially shaped their social and political development. In large part because of these conflicts, politicians and thinkers fashioned a vocabulary with which to describe political institutions, and these words, together with the concepts attached to them - freedom, republicanism, tyrany, and the like - left a profound imprint Qn the European consciousness. Their economic institutions - the bank, the check, double entry bookkeeping, maritime insurance - enabled their inhabit­ ants to conceive of work, money, profit in strikingly new ways and laid the foundations for the subsequent economic development of Europe. Their techno­ logical know-how, from bronze casting with which to produce both cannons and pieces of sculpture, to cathedral building, from Gerini,

Episodes from the life of Saint Fina.

Frugoni: "'New" Saints

Fig. 4 Treviso, The church of Saint Catherine, Tommaso da Modena, Sa int Catherine of Alexandria with the model of Treviso.

91

City and Citizen: Changing Perceptions in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries ALISON BROWN

OTIDNG

SERVES BETTER to conjure up images of one's beloved city than absence from it. "I love generally all our city's men, the laws, the customs, the walls, the houses, the streets, the churches and the countryside," Francesco Vettori wrote to Machiavelli from Rome in 1513. "Nor would 1 have greater displeasure than to think this city had to suffer and these things . .. go in ruins."1 Leon Battista Alberti, born an exile from Florence, thought that the greatest of all pleasures for a civilized man was to "wander through cities and provinces" and gaze on " the temples, the theaters,

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buildings of every kind made pleasurable to look at by man and nature."2 For Machiavelli, it was the hustle and bustle and changeability of urban life that distinguished " big cities" like Florence, Rome, and Athens from "these deserts of Arabia" in provincial Carpi;l and the same qualities also made Florence or "as it might be Rome or Pisa" - the natural setting for comedy, another of the attractions of city life.4 This provides a clue to the analogy between ancient and medieval city­ states at one level of civic consciousness, as a shared memory of city life. It was their size, their buildings, their laws, and their customs that enabled cities like Rome, Venice, and Florence to identify w�th Rome and Athens and feel

1 . 20 August 1513, ed. F. Gaeta, Machiavelli, Lettere, (Milan, 1961) 285: "Arno generalmente tutti gli huomini di quella pa cina nostraJ, Ie leggi, i costumi, Ie mura, Ie case, Ie vie Ie chiese et iI contado, ne posso havere il maggior dispiacere che pensare quella havere a ttibolare et quelle cose havere andare in ruina." 2 . De commodis IitteTarum atque ;ru;ommodis, ed. L. G. Carotti (Florence, 1976) 50: "Etenim voluptatum prestantissiina et Iibero homine digna una ilia est per urbes provinciasque vagari, multa et templa et theatra, menia atque omnium generwn edificia spectare, locaque ambire, que tum natura amenissima, grata munitissima, tum manu et ingenio hominum fuerint ad conspectum pulcra. " 3. As he told a friar disillusioned with the fickleness of prostitutes in Florence, letter to F. Guicciardini, 1 8 May 1521, Lettere, 409-10. 4. La Mandragola, in 11 Tea tro e tutti gli scritti letteTari, ed. F. Gaeta (Milan, 1977) 56: "Questa e Firenze vostta; un'altta volta sara Roma 0 Pisa," cited by H. Levin, "Notes towards a definition of City Comedy," in Renaissance Genres, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) 131. . . •

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Consciousness and Representation

"homely confidence" in ancient literature.s We clearly should not exaggerate the importance of specifically classical ingredients in this generalized love of city; indeed, it is difficult to isolate them. Nearly all Italian towns were built on classical foundations, cathedrals rising from pagan basilicas, marketplaces located on ancient forums. In the fifteenth century, as earlier, classical and Christian elements were merged to form a cohesive whole.6 The locus of philosophical discussions in Alberti's dialogues is not the academy but the cathedral, which provided not only a meeting ground for citizens but "shadow enough to cover the entire Tuscan population," in his imaginative image.7 More than the walls, the cathedral thus served to unite the whole Florentine dominion in the fifteenth century. And what was true of Florence was even more true of Venice, whose basilica San Marco became the potent center of civic ritual. 8 Nor was there any conflict between citizens' patriotism, or campanilismo, love of their city'S bells, and their loyalty to the Church. Giovanni Rucellai combined pleasure in being born in Florence, "which is considered the wor­ thiest and most beautiful patria not only in Christendom but the whole world," with satisfaction that he was also born "in the middle of the faith, that is, near Rome, the residence of our most holy lord pope and his honorable brothers, the cardinals, who represent Christ with the apostles."9 Patriotism continued in this period to underpin religion as a bond to cement the antago­ nistic classes of these mobile and socially diversified cities. Remigio de' Girolami, member of an old aristocratic Florentine family as well as a Dominican teacher, does not perhaps illustrate "popular" sentiment, but his sermons on patriotism, with his well-known depiction of the citizen of a destroyed city as "a painted image or a form of stone," succeeded by the fifteenth century in creating widely shared civic pride.lO What better evidence of this than the be-

5. G. Billanovich, explaining Landolfo Colonna's "constant references to matters and places most familiar" to him in his Livy, "Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951) 167. 6. See J. Le Goff, "L'immaginario urbano nell' Italia medievale (sec. v-xv) " in Storia d'Italia, Annali 5 (Turin, 1982) 543; C. Frugoni, Una lontana cittl (Turin, 1983); A. I. Galletti, "Modelli urbani nell'eti comunale: Gerusalemme ," in Modelli nella storia del Pensiero Politico, ed. V. I. Comparato (Aorence, 1987) 89-101. 7. De pictura, preface dedicated to Brunelleschi, architect of the dome ed. C. Grayson (London, 1972) 32-33: "ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e' popoli toscani"; cf. Profugiorum ab aerumna, Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, ii (Bari, 1966), esp. 1 07-9. In the Novella del Grasso legnaiuolo attributed to Brunelleschi, it was in the Duomo, on a working day, that the master

carpenter met Brunelleschi and Donatello, "che s'abdavano ragionando insieme, come era di loro usanza," ed. C. Varese, Novellieri del Quattrocento (Turin, 1977) 70. 8. E. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), and on the Saint Mark legend, Patricia Fortini Brown, "The Self-Definition of the Venetian Repulic," in this volume. 9. Giovanni Rucellai e il suo Zibaldone, ed. A. Perosa (London, 1 960) 1 17, cf. 65-78, listing the beauties of Aorence and Rome. 10. "Unde destructa civitate remanet civis lapideus aut depictus, quia scilicet caret virtute et operatione quam prius habebat," De bono comuni, ed. M. C. de Mattei, La "Teologia politica e comunale" di Remigio de' Girolami (Bologna, 1977) 18; cf. C. T . Davis, "An early Aorentine Political Theorist: Era Remigio de' Girolami," Dante's Italy (Philadelphia, 1984) 198-

223.

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havior of Florentines in January 1409, who emerged after a memorable four days' snowfall spontaneously to construct not snowmen but the civic insignia: "a great quantity of lions - beautiful, too - on almost every corner and in the loggias"; and on the piazza of San Michele Berteldi a "six-foot Hercules."l1 By the mid-fifteenth century this patriotism was widely diffused among the citizen class, who now modeled themselves closely on classical precedent. One man who claimed "not to be very clever and to have no grasp of the important matters under discussion" repeatedly intervened in policy discussions in Florence in the 1450s with quotations from Sallust, and analogies drawn from "ancient examples" and "the fall of Rome," to urge the need for sacrifice and unityY In other debates, citizens cited Aristotle to argue for humanity in administering the republic and the use of the middle way, "Aristotelico more," and one citizen - in a confused but pleasing transference of gender roles - stood up to argue that one's patria is like a materfamilias who, having brought up and educated her children, needs protecting by them . in their adulthood.13 It was at the level of politics that the analogy between classical and medieval Italian city-states was felt most keenly. As Pocock reminds us, the theory of the polis is essentially "political theory in its purest form," and it offered a valuable paradigm to Italian communes about how to govern cities with the mixed and changeable populations described by Machiavelli: "A city composed of interacting persons rather than of universal norms and traditional institutions."14 The message of the popular Aristotle was participation by all for the sake of the common good - a high risk commitment, as Pocock says, because unless everyone loved his country more than his soul, corruption and despotism would result: "Once justice ...was identified by the distributive

11. Bartolommeo del Coraz, Diano fiorentino, Arch. Stor. Ital. ser. 5, 14 (1894) 246: "Fecionsi per Firenze grande quantili di lioni e begli: quasi in sun ogni canto ne era unOj e aile loggie, grandi e begli: e fessi in sulla piazza di San Michele Berteldi uno Hercole lungo ii braccia, e stette bene." Since Savonarola imprecated against "quelli Erculi e quelle cose vane" erected by children who "vortiano fare qualche festa," instead of crucifixes, it was clearly a custom that continued, Prediche sopra Ezechiele, ed.R. Ridolfi (Rome, 1955) ii, 208 (12 March 1497). Hercules had been represented on the communal seal since at least 12 8 1, D. Marzi, La Cancellena della Repubb/ica fioren tina (Rocca San Casciano, 1910) 377 85. 12. Donato Cocchi, ASF Cons. Prato 55, fols. 25v, 31r-v, 38v (2 4 July 1458): "cum parvi ingenii sit, res magnas quemadmodum haec sunt se non intelligere dixit," "veteribus exemplis" (38v), "excidii plurimarum urbium imprimis Romanae urbis" (31 v)j d. Coluccio Salutati's lerters arguing that "sicut Grecie civitates inter se de imperio dimicantes omnes imperio caruerunt, sic nos in defensionem discordes optatissima, quod cum dolore precogitamus, carebimus libertate," Missive la Cane. 16v, quoted by R.G. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and his Public Letters (Geneva, 1976) 50. 13 . ASF Cons. Prat. 60 fols. 14v (Domenico Martelli): "laudavit summum magistratum & decemviros Aristotelis auctoritate qui civilem administrationem humanam et clementem esse iubet et tyrannidis contrariam"j 13v (Franco Sachetti): "Paa-iam matrem familias dixit ... Itaque succurrendum esse matri censuit e proprie et ab omni iniuria et ignominiam vindicandam." (Jan. 1468); 137r (idem) : "In ea ergo medium si inveniri possit perquirendum Aristotelico more" (March 1472). 14. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975) 74-5.

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justice of the polis, salvation became in some degree social, in some degree dependent upon others." Greater familiarity with classical texts as they were rediscovered and translated encouraged more detailed comparisons with the structure and con­ stitutions of ancient cities.1s Bruni's 1403 Laudatio of Florence, modeled on Aristides' Panathenaica, set the pace, to be in turn imitated by Pier Candido Decembrio's De laudibus Mediolanensium Urbis in comparationem Florentiae panegyricus in 1436, and "in a kind of turning inside-out" of Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini's 1459 Gratio in laudem Rei Publicae VenetorumY; Underlying their obvious rhetoric and imitation was a serious attempt to analyze the political and legal, as well as the physical, structure of Italian cities in terms of ancient republics, culminating in Machiavelli's prolonged reflections on Roman re­ publicanism in his Discourses on the First Decade of Livy. Thus for Bruni, Florence's liberty consisted in its short-term offices and absence of a single head, as well as in the legislative sovereignty of its two councils; equality consisted in the subjection of all citizens to communal laws and the special protection afforded to commoners from assaults by the nobles - under the control of the Guelf party, which he compared to the Roman censors, Spartan ephors, and Athenian Areopagites. When he analyzed the constitution again in 1439, for the benefit of Greek visitors to the Council of Florence, he explained it in terms of Aristotle's polity or middling constitution that excluded both the highest and the lowest classes from government.17 In Venice, by contrast, the best analogy for its mixed constitution of doge, senate, and Great Council (all drawn, after 1297, from a closed nobility) was provided by Plato's Laws. Plato was not initially popular as a model for republican communes, though providing, through Cicero's De officiis an early argument for patriotism and unity. The first translation of The Republic, for the duke of Milan in the early fifteenth century served only to make a familiar moral point about how easily republics decline into tyrannies.18 It was not un­ til the middle of the century that George of Trebizond's translation of The Laws was used to provide a model of mixed government for Venice, to be developed in greater detail in Contarini's De magistratibus.19 In: Florence Plato was adopted as a model only in the second half of the fifteenth century, encour-

15. A. Grahon and L. Jardine, FTom Humanism to the Humanities (London, 1986), esp. 5 8-98, for an account of the detailed investigation of classical institutions encouraged by new teaching methods in the fiheenth century. 1 6 . F. Krantz, "Between Bruni and Machiavelli: History, Law and Historicism in Poggio Bracciolini," in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. P. Mack and M. C. Jacob (Cambridge, 1 98 7) 131, the reference to which lowe to Julius Kirshner. 17. Bruni's Laudatio is translated in The Earthly Republic, ed. B. G. Kohl and R. G. Witt, 135-75, esp. 168-74; his 1439 On the Constitution of the Florentines in The Renaissance, ed. E. Cochrane and J. Kirshner (Chicago, 1986) 140-4. 18. F. Adorno, "Uberti Decembris prologus in Platone De Republica, in Stueli in onore eli Antonio Corsano (Manduria, 1970) 10. 19. Ibid., 14-17; F . Gilbert, "The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought," in Florentine Studies, ed. N. Rubinstein (London, 1968) 468-70.

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aged - as I have argued elsewhere - by the growing power of the Medici as unofficial rulers of the city. Then the revival of the Platonic corpus helped to project the Medici as philosopher rulers, who combined power with wisdom by using all the tricks of the ·ancient trade: bread, circuses, triumphs, exile, and penal taxation together with art, culture, and a philosophical academy.20 Above all, however, it was republican Rome that provided the most appropriate - and easily accessible - analogy for Italian communes. Most obviously it was the polarity of the senate and the people that offered com­ parison with the communes' dual councils of the Commune and the People, the popular captain acting, like the tribune in Rome, as protector of common­ ers against. the nobles. According to Machiavelli, following Livy, it was the clash of interests between the nobility and the people that preserved Rome's freedom, hence the value of the Roman model to Italian city-states. Yet not everyone interpreted the analogy in this way, as we can see from the Milanese chronicler, to whom the ideogram S.P.Q.F., inscribed in Roman letters on a shield in Florence's communal palace, immediately signified Florence's propagandis­ tic claim to be Rome's political heir, "as though Florence had been left heir to Roman liberty!" he expostulated.l1 Within Florence in the later fifteenth century, reflecting the move toward greater elitism, the contrast between senate and people was used not to distinguish nobility from commoners as two balanced poles in the constitution, but a senate of qualified officeholders from the rest of the populace - a significant shift from a polarized power structure toward a more unitary one.22 At the same time republican terminology was used to legitimize changed procedures increasing the power of the government: rogation to legitimize the use of non-notarial secretaries to draft laws and subscribe letters, and e republica 20. A. Brown, "Platonism in Fiheenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought," Journal of Modem History 58 (1986) 383-413. In Bartolomeo Platina's De optimo cille (ed. F. Battaglia [Bologna, 1944)1 83), Lorenzo revealingly asks the question "Qui de republica scripsere, probaruntne ludos? .An haec consuetudo ut alia permulta irrepsit vimque legis in civitatibus cepit?" to which Platina replies that games did not replace laws in republics, since Cosimo not only liberated his city from external enemies but provided it with laws and institutions. 2 1 . A. Biglia, Historiae patriae libri nollem, ed. L. A. Muratori, RIS XIX (1723) col. 33, cited by Diana Webb in her "doctoral thesis, "Tuscan Historiography, c. 1400-c. 1360, and the Problem of Florentine Hegemony in Tuscany" (University of London, 1977) 33: "Romanis literis inscriptum S.P.Q.F. tanquam florentino nomini relicta esset romanae Iibertatis haereditas." On this claim, which gave Florence as heir to Roamn republicanism "by hereditary right, dominion over the entire world," see Bruni's Laudatio, 149-552. 22. On the use of senate for the signoria and colleges, see P. Rajna in Arch. Stor. ltal., ser. 7, 13 (1930) 189-206; on its use for the Settanta, A. Brown, Bartolomeo Scala, 1430-1497, Chancellor of Florence, (Princeton, 1979) 262, and for the Ottanta, J. Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. A. Gelli (Florence, 1 858) i, 431: "'I senato cioe il consiglio deg1i ottanta." Scala uses the formula "senatus populusque" in letters and orations from 1466 (for example, ASF Missive 1a. Canc. 45, fol. 106r, letter to Ferrante of Naples, 23 September 1466) and restricts the function of governing to the senate in his 1496 Apologia, Brown, "Platonism," 403. Cf. L. Carbone's speech in Florence in 1473: "lnvero mi parse vedere una similitudine del Senato romano," cit. E. Garin, "Motivi di cultura filosofica ferrarese nel rinascimento," in La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961) 403. ', Societa 1/ Stato Plel Mtldierlo veneziano (secoli XII-XIV) (Florence: Olschki, 1967). Se Rolandino's quote on 206. 9. Antonio I. Pini, "Dal Comune cina-stato a Comune ente amnistrativo," in Storia d'Italia, ed. Giuseppe Galasso, IV (Turin: UfET, 1981) 449-587. Se especially pp. 451-452. 10. Joban Plesner, L'brtigration de 14 CIlmpagne lJ 14 ville libre de Florence au XIlIe siecle (Copenhagen, 1934) (Italian translation: Florence: Papafava, 1979). On Plesner, se Paolo Camosano, "Cittl e campagna: rapporti politici ed economici," in Societa e istituzioni dell'Italia comunale: I'esempio di Perugia (seoli XII-XIV) (Perugia: Deputazione di storia patria per l'Umbria, 1988) 303 349. See in particular p. 338f. This is also a usefu l study in other respects.

312 Politics and Conflict

the "development," "liberation," and "ferment" that carried everyone in their wake: nobiles, milites, negotiatores, cives, servi, clerics, and lay persons, the forces of the city and the country, Catholics and heretics ("the evolution of feudalism as the need for liberty"), rather than the grim effect of exclusion and annihilation.ll The idea of an objective "contamination" between the world of the city and the world of the country, or even of an "organic unity between the urban and rural ruling class" (as Rosario Romeo wrote), was not long in presenting itself to historians.u Already Giovanni Tabaco, in a review of Cristiani, hy­ pothesized that the communal age represented "not so much the triumph of collective forces in the face of the supposed hierarchies of the aristocracy, but rather a process of definition of all of the forces involved. "13 In the same year Gino Luzzatto, studying the castle communes and the small urban communes of the Marches and Umbria, disputed the idea that the birth of the commune signified the "sunset" of "feudalism." Even after the victory of the "people," the communal regime was not at all "democratic" and continued to be accessible to the stronger members of the "old aristocracy. "1. In fact, Carlo G. Mor did not hesitate to speak of feudalism with regard to the communes.u Tabacco again observed, using much documentation and many examples, that "l'etude du plein developpement seigneurial et feodal dans Ie 'regnum Italiae' exige d'etre abordee desormais comme un probleme specifique de l'epoque des Communes." He did not see elements of feudalism in the commune as a prelude nor as a "residue." And he was referring mainly to Piedmont, an area that contained many consortiums of signori and communes of seignorial origin.16 The projection inside the city, or rather the communes, of the institutions and mentality of feudalism took place, not coincidentally, in a period when a rediscovery of the force and values of the rural world, at least in certain circles, was occurring. In 1965, Chinese leader Lin Piao identified the country (understood as those areas of the world where an agricultural economy preYails) - and not the city (understood as those areas of the world where an industrial economy prevails) - as the true epicenter of revolution: Indeed, the great revolutions of the modem era - from the American to the Chinese, from the Algerian to the Cuban - developed as a "slow and gradual assault on the 1 1 . Cinzio Violante, La societa miianese nell'eta flTecomunak, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1974) . 12. Rosario Romeo, "La signoria deIl'abate di Sant'Ambrogio di Milano sui comune rurale di Origgio nel secolo XIl," Rivista storictJ italitma 69 (1957) 340-507. Se especiaIly p. 340. 13. Giovani Tabacco, "Interpretazioni e ricerche suIl'aristocrazia comunale di Pisa," Studi medievali 3 (1962) 707-727. Se especiaIly pp. 726-727. 14. Gino LuzzatlO, "Tramonto e sopravvivenza del feudalismo nei comuni italiani del Medio Evo," Studi medievali 3 (1962) 401 -419. 15. Carlo G. Mor, "Leg feudali," in Novissimo Digesto italiano, IX (Turin: UTET, 1963) 711 -714. Se especially p. 712. 16. Giovanni Tabacco, "Fief et seigneurie dans l'Italie communale, L'evolution d'un theme historiographique," Le Moyen Age (1969) 5-37, 203-218. See particularly p. 212.

Cracco: Social Structure and Conflict 31 3

city by the country."17 There was a certain tendency to extol the "happiness" of the farmer who lived on the land and worked for himself, as compared with the alienation of the worker who lived in the city, worked in someone's factory, and was dependent upon others.18 For Marxist scholars who special­ ized in medieval Italy, it was natural to show sympathy for the peasant and in general for the lower classes of the city and the countryside. Victor Rutenburg, for example, studied the "people," whom he understood to be workers, living "in modest conditions, often on the verge of indigence." He also spoke of an urban "pre-proletariat" oppressed by its masters, which fact justified the uprisings against the rich, in particular the Ciompi revolution, which due to its "anti-feudal direction" gave Florence "a splendid period of popular de­ mocracy."l' liubov A. Kotel 'nikova emphasized the importance of serfs and peasants, leaseholders and sharecroppers - the world of the Italian peasant in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries - who sufered the double exploitation of the feudal lords and the urban ruling classes.2o These perspectives, which lead one to consider the forces at the base of society, were not readily accepted in the West.21 Studies like that of Elio Conti, which produced an avalanche of data on the agrarian structure of the Florentine countryside, were practically isolated.22 Interest for workers in the city contin­ ued to languish - if one excludes the brief period tied to the activism of 1968,23 Most of the attention, if not all of it, was devoted to the world of the signor; (the "feudal" world, as Marxist historians used to say). This approach also had the advantage of linking Italian to European history on the basis of a common aristocratic background (Otto Brunner's influence is obvious).24 At that point it was no longer enough to have discovered the world of the signoria transplanted in the heart of the city. This perspective held open the issue of the conflict or lack of conflict among classes that were different or in opposition. Instead, it was important to appraise only that world, to know and analyze it from the inside by utilizing the one structure that distinguished 17. Giorgio Galli, "La ricomparsa delle 'campagne nel mondo' come epicentro rivoluzionario," in 11 fenomeno "cilta " nella vita e nella cultura d'oggi, ed. Piero Nardi (Flo­ rence: Sansoni, 1971 ) 127-136 at 135; Martin Ebon, Lin Piao, The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler (New York: S�n and Day, 1970) 228-229. 18. Ugo Spirito, "Vita Urbana e vita rurale," in 11 fenomeno "citra", cit., 63·71. 19. Victor Rutenburg, Popo/o e mouimenti popolari nell'Italia tkl '300 e '400, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1971) xviii. 20. Liubov A. Kotel 'nikova, Mondo contadino e cina in ltalia dall'XI al XIV secolo, Daile fonti tkll'Italia centrale e settentrionale, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1967). 21 . Studies like those cited in the two preceding footnotes remained "out of the sight of historians." Raoul Manselli, Introdutione all'edizione italiana of V. Rutenburg, p. xiv. 22. Elio Conti, La formazione tklla struttura agraria motUrna nel contado fIOrentino, I (Le campagne nell'eta precomunale) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per i1 Medioevo, 1965). 23. Se, for example, Michel MoUat-Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus, }tlCques et Ciompi. Les rwolutions populaires en Europe awe XI� et XV, siecles (Paris: Co1mann-Levy, 1970). But later the centennial of the Ciompi uprising was scarcely remembered in Italy. Se II tumulto dei Ciompi. Un momenta di storia flOrenUna ed europea (Florence: Olschki, 1981). 24. Ot Brun, Vita PIObiliare e cultura europea, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1972).

31 4

Politics and Conflict

it: the family. Thus, the family became the true protagonist of social history. Conflicts, when they arose, could be only among families, groups, or family clans, or even between domus and civitates.2S In fact, a close reflection "sur les structures internes des groupes familiaux parentaux ou consortiaux" meant investigating under another form the subject of "stratification" and "mobilite sociale. "26 In effect, the family as a composite reality - made up of "tant de feudataires et de seigneurs que de proprietaires terriens et de personnes exer�ant une profession liberale comme les notaires, juges ou marchands" - rendered useless the traditional oppositions like nobility versus people, or feudal lords versus merchantsP The family as an autonomous reality, capable of establish­ ing processes and proper means of social cohesion and always able to influence the city government (either by allying itself with or against it), made the old distinction between communal forces and those of the countryside ineffectual (the Da Gorzano family, who were able to polarize the military aristocracy in the Asci territory, is a case in point).28 However, in the meantime, Paolo Cammarosano also illustrated the problems that the families faced in trying to preserve their unity and continuity within the urban landscape. This was true both for aristocratic and bourgeois families. The nuclear family was favored, notwithstanding all the strategies that sought to restrict it. These were evident in contracts of consorteria and those involving a joint fraternal venture (fraterna). The vicissitudes of the nuclear family show that urban life was nonetheless able to afect and modify even the hard kernel of the family structure.29 Therefore, the discussion, chaneled through the study of families, returned to the city-state in its role as a gathering place and also as a force for the assimilation of groups of different background and origin. From this, historians felt the need to reformulate the question, to ask themselves again what the origins of urban society were: what were the classes that actually shaped it, while shaping themselves at the same time? Otto of Freising, in his Gesta Friderici, had already expressed this clearly: there were three ordines that constituted the center of the Italian cities that were obstinately rebellious toward the empire around the mid-twelfth cen­ tury: capitane;, valvassores, plebs.30 But it took Hagen Keller's interpretation, which culminated in his book of 1 979, to save them from the vagueness of 25. Jacques Heers, Le clan familial au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universiraires de France, 1974). 26. Cinzio Violanu:, " Quelques caracterisciques des structures familiales en Lombardie, Emilie et Toscane au XI" et XII" siedes," in Pami/le et parenti dans l'Occidem midial, Actcs. . , ed. Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff (Rome: Ecole Fralse de Rome, 1977) 87-147, at 87. 27. Gabriella Rosset, "Histoire familiale et structures sociales et politiques a Pisa au XI" et XII" siecles," in Pamille et parenti, cit., 159-180, at 1 86. 28. Renato Bordone, "L'aristocrazia militare del ll:rtorio di Asci: I signori di Gorzano," Bollettino stonco-bibliografico subalpino 69 (1971) 357-447, at 41 1£.; 70 (1972) 489-544. 29. Paolo Camrosano, "Les structures familiales dans les villes de l'ltalie communale, Xlle_XJVe siecles," in Famille et parenti, cit., 181-194, at 192-1 93. 30. II, 13, in MGH, SS, 20, 396-397. .

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literary evidence and define their characteristics. The capitanei was a specific and cohesive class, already formed during the tenth century through the control of signorie bannali and bishops' feudal holdings, and simultaneously relocated to the cities and in the territories. The valvassores, which had a more variegated and less noble origin, after having lived in the shadow of the capitanei, as their vassals, came to the fore as an independent class through the Milanese revolts of 1035, which were quelled by the imperial constitution two years later, which consolidated the whole urban aristocracy. The plebs included merchants, money dealers, and other popular forces who, in a climate in which ecclesiastic power was increasingly weak and the civitas was progres­ sively spreading to the detriment of the places and territories that bordered it, were able to ally themselves with or against the nobiles as ocasion dictated. In this way, they created their own niche and rooted themselves in the land.J1 The directness of this approach had the advantage of applying the model of the ordines, which had already been accepted in the European context, to Italy (see the work by Georges Duby on the region maconnaise). This ap­ proach was confirmed not only by a number of sources explored ex novo, but also through an important current of Italian historiography that had already emphasized in a considerable number of studies the feudal origins of urban society.32 Nevertheless, criticism and even alarm once again resulted. How was it possible, they asked, to deny all novelty and even originality to Italian urban history and see it as merely an extension or appendix to feudal society? An opposition - and I refer not only to the one that which came about later within the city-state between Adel und Volk surely had existed previously between the Adel und Burgentum.JJ The criticism and alarm became more urgent with regard to another contribution that appeared almost simultaneously with Keller's: the work "Economia e societa nell'Italia medievale: il mito della borghesia" by Philip Jones. Yes, the bourgeoisie as a pleasant fairy tale; the social conflict between the "two Italies " was anything but "absolute." Together with the feudal (or feudalized ) seignorial and courtly South, therewas a North (Friuli, the Tyrol, and most of Piedmont) with characteristics that were not significantly different. The cities, with few exceptions, "although organized as communes, with guilds and popular groups," were dominated by a nobility that "resided both in castles and in cities." As in ancient Rome, the cities themselves remained essentially " agrarian," "heterogeneous communities of nobles and rentiers (nobiles, milites, gentiluomint1, of shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants (plebei, pedites, popo/ani), " "whose wealth or whose means of sustenance came from the earth. "34 -

3 1 . Hagen Keller, Adelsherschaft utld stitische Gesellschaft in Oberita/ien, 9. bis 12. Jahrhundert (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1979) at 36f. 32 . In this regard se the Literatu, used by H. Keller in his above-cited work, 411-434. 33. Here I allude to the work of Berthold Stahl, Adel utld Volle im florentine, Dugento (Koln-Graz: BOhlau, 1965). 34. Philip Jones, "Economia e societi nell'ltalia medievale: la legenda della borghesia,"

316

Politics and Conflict

An hypothesis of this sort was not completely new. Already in 1965 the same author considered the dominant class of the communes "a heterogeneous social group composed of small feudal lords and merchants" and felt that the "fratricidal fighting" unleashed in the cities was only "partly of social origin, and more often of a political and personal nature"3S Nevertheless, this opinion was seen as "scandalous," capable of canceling, like Keller'S, the urban uniqueness of Italian history, especially because some scholars had already begun, on their own, drastically to revise, in an urban perspective, their own conceptions. In effect, starting in 1 976 Tabacco had shelved the idea implicit in Fief et seigneurie dans I'Italie communale in order to examine in a new light the urban organism.3' It seemed to grow spontaneously from itself, so to speak, from the continuity of a body of cives, which although organized within the larger structure of a res publica and locally controlled by a bishop, at a certain point developed into a "new political nucleus. " This later phase sometimes occurred precociously, as in Cremona. The involvement of the bishop, with his temporal power, did not count because the urban commune "was never precisely identified, whatever its religious fervor, with the Church of the bishops. " The presence of the capitanei was not a determining factor either: in fact, cete,; homines also existed in the city. At any rate, the bishop and the capitanei could not prevent, in the end, the city from becoming "an entity of people. " Thus, the pattern of the approach to the study of urban society was no longer res publica, bishops, and feudal system, but rather res publica, bish­ ops, and city. The necessary disclaimer to this statement is that the city was the original and undisputed "before" and "after" of the other two, as if the res publica and, to an even greater degree, the bishops were an interlude on the way or a parenthesis in the uniformly urban continuity of Italian history.37 The breadth and depth of the debate elicited further research and contri­ butions, which led to further progress in studies on urban society. New monographic studies, dedicated to individual cities, appeared; for example, Pierre Racine on Piacenza in 1979 and Renato Bordone on Asti in 1980. They added to the already existing and not insignificant body of work.38 New studies with different perspectives appeared. Antonio I. Pini, using Carlo Cattaneo's vision of the city-commune as an "ideal beginning" of Italian in Storia d'italia, Annali I, nal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1 978) 1 85-372, at 206-207 and 222-223. 35. Philip Jones, "Comuni e Signorie: la cittA-stato nell'Italia tardo-medievale," in id., Economia e soQeu MIl'ltaw medieuale, Italian tr. (Turin: Einaudi, 1980) 503-526, at 507. 36. Se n. 1 6. 37. Giovanni Tabacco, "Vescovi e oomuni in ltalia, " in I pateri tempOf'ali de; Vescovi in ltaw e in Gnmani4 1181 Medioevo, ed. Carlo G. Mor and Heinrich Schmidinger (Bologna: II Mulino, 1979) 253-282, at 262-265. 3 8 . Pierre Racine, Plaisance du X- a la fin du Xlll- siecle. &sai d'histoire ..rbaine (Lille-Paris, 1979); Renato Bordone, Cina II tertorio Mll'alto medioevo. La societa astigiana dal dominio de; Franchi all'affnmazione co_nale (Turin: Deputazione subalpina di storia patria, 1980).

Craceo: Social Structure and Conflia 317

history, immediately distanced himself from it to affirm, following the trail of Caggese, that the commune, even the commune born in the countryside, and not the city, was the true "ideal beginning." This view implied a subsequent reevaluation of those "fundamental rural and 'feudal' dimensions of Italian history that centuries of cultural, aristocratic and urban-centered tradition had obstinately sought to ignore." However, in 1974, Galasso had already found "in that tendency to emphasize local and individual interests - no longer in one city alone or in one commune alone - the true distinguishing thread of Italian history from the pre-Roman age to Unification. "3' On the other hand, Bordone, examining a broad range of studies on Piacenza, Asti, Parma, Bergamo, Lucca, and Pisa, concluded that " the city is never undifferentiated from the country; rather, it displays its own unmistakable originality." He also stated that it would be incorrect to reduce the city to "purely a place of transit or a place for the establishment of the 'feudal nobility' that already controlled and governed the territory of the country­ side." Furthermore, he felt that the communal movement could not be con­ sidered the "product of a single force, the aristocracy of the territory, feudal or in any case not 'bourgeois,'" being precisely the "fruit of a society that was above all urban and therefore socially multi-faceted." This is true, even if "generalized models, whether aristocratic, feudal, or 'bourgeois,' involve making dangerous accommodations and do not respect the true physiognomy of each city's reality."40 Here he raises a prudent objection that is not always present in his later works. Bordone, intent on repulsing the assault on the " bourgeoisie" and the correlative "return to the land," insisted on the originality of the urban experience. He felt that "the specific social components of each individual urban reality" were "above all urban, distinct and different from analogous forces that operated in the country." They, however, were not necessarily mercantile, as Robert S. Lopez asserted with excessive certainty: "in the twelfth century the Italian communes had essentialy merchant governments, created by merchants to further the interests of merchants. "41 Perhaps I should cite other studies that havt appeared in recent years for the additional clarification they have added to the theme of the Sozialstruktur of the Italian city-state, not the least of which is John Koenig'S. His research d�als with the "people" of northern Italy "at the time of its greatest splen­ dor," that is, the "communal bourgeoisie" of the thirteenth century that, "having organized itself as a 'people' revitalized the old commune" (that of the milites), "and gave it a second life. "41 I have on purpose not spoken of a 39. Se n. 9. 40. Renato Bordone, "Tema cittadino e 'ritomo alIa terra' nella storiografia comunale recente," Quademi storiei 18 (1983) 255-277, at 272-273 . . 41. Roberto S. Lopez, La rillOlMz:ione commerciale tkl Mediowo, Italian translation (Turin, 1975) 91; Renato Bordone, La societa cittadina del Regno d'lta/ia, Pomr4Zion e wilNppo tklle caratteristiche UrbaPUl M seoli Xl e XlI (Turin: Deputazione subalpina di storia pattia, 1987) 196-197. 42. John Koenig, II "papolo» tkll'ltalia tkl Nord PUll XIII secolo, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1986) at 409, 412. Se especially Paolo Castignoli, "In margine all'opera

318

Politics and Conflict

whole group of important studies that involve mainly Florence and Venice and thus, rather than dealing with medieval city-states, touch upon the civic world of the early Renaissance (to use Gene Brucker's words), a world that "Machiavelli would have found familiar. "43 If on the one hand a reference to other studies confirms the vitality of the interest in the cities, on the other hand it does not significantly modify the panorama of the various tendencies. This panorama is seen to be rather interrupted, as a very recent debate demonstrated. The discussion was dedicated to the evolution of Italian cities in the eleventh century and was not inclined to concentrate on actual social conflict because it tended to consider the city a place where sufficiently united classes - whether bourgeois or noble dominated.44 Given the current state of research in this field, does not the possibility exist of reconsidering the "urban issue" and therefore of better understanding the mechanism of social conflict that characterized it? An answer to this question should be furnished by one of the excellent scholars of urban history mentioned above (for example, Keller, author of another recent and important study) and not by the present author who investigated, many years ago, only the Venetian case.4S And with scanty results because my conclusions, which appeared to be specific to the city-state, not to the "maritime" city, and which, thus, seemed linked with the afairs of other urban societies, did not sufficiently undermine the myth of Venice's unique­ ness.'" Yet, the conviction that Venice is not only a phenomenon apart, that it should be linked (while retaining its peculiar characteristics) with the world that surrounds it encourages us to enter the debate, and even to begin with Venice, as offering some suggestions for reflection. The first and most arduous problem is that of the origin and initial development (eleventh and twelfth centuries) of the urban city. It would be a mistake, in this case, to adopt Machiavelli's opinion according to which in Venice, "not availing itself of the land" and where everyone was involved in "trade," "the serious and natural animosity amongst the nobility an'"d the people caused by the desire of the first to command and the second not to obey" was lacking - in contrast to the situation in ancient Rome and Flo-

di John Koenig:

una

contrastata interpretazione del 'populus' piacentino nel XIII secolo,"

BolletllO swrico piacentino 82 (1987) 1-19. 43. Gene Brucker, Dal ComUM alia Signoria. La vita pubblica a pj"em:e MI primo Rirrascimento, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1981) 21. 44. L'evo/uzione delle a ua italiane MII'XI seoow, edited b y Renato Bordone and Jorg Jarnut (Bologna: II Mulino, 1988). 45. Hagen Keller, Kommune': Sta dti sche Selbstregierung und mittelalterliche 'Volksherschaft' im Spiegel italienischer Wahlverfahren des 12.-14. Jahrhunderts, in Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter, Karl Schmid zum funfundsechzigsten Geburstag, ed. Gerd Althoff, Dieter Geuenich, Otto G. Oexle, and Joachim Wollasch (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1988) 57361 6. This work is also to be consulted for further bibliography. 46. This is the same bifurcation that was also observed with regard to Pisa: Marco Tangheroni, " Famiglie nobiJi e ceto dirigente a Pisa nel XID secolo," in I ceti dirigenti dell'eta comunale nei seooli XII e XIII (Pisa: Pacini, 1982) 323-346, se especially p. 325. "'

"

Cracco: Social Structure and Conflict 31 9

rence.47 Machiavelli's opinion is not valid here not only because the direct or indirect possession (through ecclesiastic organizations) of real estate was the absolute condition for social prominence and political influence48 in Venice or because the groups interested in trade were very different and often in opposi­ tion to each other (on the one hand the stantes or lenders of mumi ad negotiandum at a high rate of interest; and on the other hand the procertantes, that is, the actual merchants);49 but also because on that basis it would not be understandable why at a certain point we find that the "nobility" and the "people" appear in Venice as well. Let us try to reconstruct this process: Venice was a society supported by too few land resources and therefore obliged to turn to commerce. The landholders invested their capital in it. The power of the dux, which had al­ ways guided Venice, was absolute even though exercised in accordance with the ecclesiastic authorities (patriarch, bishops, abbots) and iudices (the "uni­ verse of the people" was relegated to the background). This power later proved inadequate to administer the new economic situation. Thus the dux was gradually replaced by a new political group composed of maiores, iudices, and sapientes (these were to a great extent the same persons financing com­ merce) who shared amongst themselves the seats and duties of the councils (Bickerman commented that "as in ancient Rome, this aristocracy was counciliar " ).50 These people were only interested in taking the place of the dux and inheriting his absolute power. That is why they demanded that the populus swear an oath of obedience to them and no longer to the dux.51 It is evident that until then an urban society did not exist. There existed only a state of transition from a monarchy to an oligarchy, from the domination of a single family (that of the dux) to the domination of a handful of families. Society, instead, began to take shape in its different components as soon as the populus, used more and more in its capacity as labor and as military force and therefore valorized, began to make headway in seeking to imitate the "great" ones and to place itself on the same level. Some succeeded (for example, Sebastiano Ziani, who from an obSC\lre man of the people was elected many times judge and even doge in 1 172). More often this attempt was rejected or restrained, and these people were even obliged to fight to defend their own positions; a good example occurred in 1 177, when the antiqui populares (as chroniclers called them), already uneasy because of the losses suffered through the Byzantine repression, induced the nobiles to re­ nounce their project of a privileged agreement with Barbarossa, a quo nihil

47. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentiPle, 1, 29; III, 1 . 4 8 . For example, se the possessions o£ only one family: Inngard Fees, Reichtum und Macht im mitulaltMlichen Ven8dig. Die Pamilie Zia,,; (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1980) 103£. 49. Gino Luzzatto, "Capitale e lavoro nel commercio veneziano dei secoli XI e XII," in id., Sludi di storia economica IIenezUma (Padua: CEDAM, 1954) 89£. SO. Elias J. Bicken, "Some Reflections," cit., 402. 5 1 . Giorgio Cracco, "Venezia nel Medioevo: un altro mondo," in Storia d'Italia, ed. G. Galasso, cit., VIII1 (Turin: lTfET, 1987) 43-44.

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unquam habuimus.Sl More must be said: the politically active populus forced the nobiles to transform themselves, at least partly, from the "rulers" of the dukedom, from lower distributors on behalf of their own families or the family clan, to instruments of a public organism with authority over everyone: the commune.53 At this point, a conclusion seems to impose itself: Venetian society was born from the people, and thanks to the people - a people that consisted of actual merchants. But this would be a rather lame conclusion: what would the people have been without the "greats," without their political shift (the overcoming of the ducal monarchy), without their commune, without their capital? Therefore, it would be better to say that Venetian society was first born from the "greats," first born from the capitalist landowners and then, later, from the merchant people. From this we may also deduce the nature of conflict in Venice. It was not destructive of the social system (as when one class tends to anihilate the other), but rather it preserved it, in the sense that it sought to recover and maintain an equilibrium that had been upset. This was because the nobles needed the people and the people needed the nobles, at least as long as the structure that justified that type of social relationship was not radically changed. One may verify the usefulness of this conclusion by extending the discus­ sion to various other coastal cities. It holds true for Genoa, where great landowning families, having detached themselves from feudal subjugation, began to invest in trade and fit out ships. As a result they drew from their ranks a people made up of sailors and merchants (the crews consisted not only of cives but also of leaseholders taken from the lands of the persons who were fitting out the ships). This people, notwithstanding its obscure origins (cuius nomen et cognomen non aliter vidi, as an historian noted), grew in the course of the twelfth century to the point of entering into conflicts with its own "masters."54 In Pisa, a sufficiently stable equilibrium between the inter­ ests of landowners and merchants, to which the maiores, medii pariterque minores were dedicated under the guidance of the bishop and the viscount, also delayed the outbreak of serious conflict until the start of the thirteenth century.55 However, Bari is a case apart. There, in vain, elements of the landhold­ ing aristocracy encouraged a people composed of merchants to make the "dream of a sea-faring republic" to rival Venice come true (to that end the body of Saint Nicholas, seized in 1 087, had been kept, and the construction

52. Inngard Fees, ReichtJIm und Macht im mittelalterlichen Venedig, cit., 236ff.; Giorgio Cracco, Societa e Stato, cit., 51·52. 53. Roberto Ces, DeliberaDoni del Maggior Consiglio di VeneriI, I (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1950) 245-247; se especially p. 246 (where the document makes a distinction between the bona comunia and the suum velie). 54. Giovana Petti Balbi, "Genesi e composizione di un celO dirigente: i 'populares' a Genova nei secoIi XIII e XIV," in Spazro, Societa, poter/l nell'ItaUa dei Comu"; (Naples: Liguori, 1986) 85-103, se especially p. 91. 55. Gabriella Rosset, "Histoire familiale et stru�res sociales et poIitiques Ii Pise," cit., 169.

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of a new cathedral had been started). Soon after, Norman rule began.56 Nor is an analogy possible with the cities in Campania, because an authentic dialec­ tic relationship between the nobility and the people never occurred there.S7 This was due to the overwhelming domination of the landholding aristocracy and capital over trade. However, a comparison with the non-maritime cities is much more attractive. This is especially true of those in Lombardy whose social structure has been amply studied. And with good reason, because here - as Machiavelli would say - the "land, " that is, territory, is also involved and consequently so are the forces linked to it, which are seignorial and feudal or, in any case, "comitatine. " It is well known that the social panorama of many of the urban centers in Langobardia were dominated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by capitanei and valvassores. We have this information not only from the scan­ dalized accusations of Otto of Freising, but also from the patient research of scholars who have indicated significant "absences" from this panorama (Turin, Asti, Verona, and other centers).58 However, something may be added regard­ ing the means that brought those ordines to the summit of power in the cities. Sestan emphasized, for example, the mention made of Guglielmo, marquis of Monferrato, by Oto of Freising, qui pene salus ex ltaliae baronibus cjvitatum effugere potuit imperium, and, advised us that he was not the only one. Other "barons," though not many, in North-Central Italy remained a "force impos­ sible to assimilate" into the cities and preserved either wholly or in part their "principalities" (the Biandrate counts, the Estensi family who later established themselves in Ferrara, the Guidi counts, the Aldobrandeschis and the Malaspinas, and so on).5' But if a few survived, how many actually suc­ cumbed? Undoubtedly, the success of the capitanei and the valvassores was accompanied by a decided reduction in magni homines, that is, of feudalism in general. Furthermore, there were the bishops - even if Oto of Freising did not specifically discuss them in his famous passage - who were already firmly established in the cities. Whether or not they were counts, they were, in fact, the signori of a large part of the territory and were "more powerful than the lay officials," especially, as in the case of the rulers of the northeastern Italian cities, when they were actually emanations of the emperor.60 Thus Ariberto, an 56. Nino Lavennicoc "CittA e pattono, Bari alIa ricerca di un'identira storico-religiosa," del eNlto, S. Nicola Am Ieonografia e religiositQ popolare (Bari: Edipuglia, 1987) 927, se especially pp. 16-19. 57. Giuseppe Martini, "Bas Medioevo," in La storiagra(ra italiar neg/; ultimi lIent'an, cit., 382f. 58. R. Bordone, La societQ cittadina del Regno d'Italia, cit., 162f. 59. Emesto Sestan, "La citra comunale italiana dei secoli XI-XII nelle sue note caratteristiche rispet al movimento comunale europeo," in Forme di potere e stn4ttJ4ra sociale in ltalia nel Medioevo, ed. Gabriella Rosset (Bologna: II Mulino, 1977) 1 75-196, se especially pp. 188-189. 60. Vito Furnagalli, "II potere civile dei vescovi italiani aI tempo di Ottone I," in I poteri temporali dei lIeseovi, cit., 77-86, se especially p. 82. in II segno

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extraordinary example of a "feudal lord," 61 was shaken by a revolt by valvassores (in the meaning of this term as clarified by Keller).61 In 1 123 we also find the case, in Vicenza, of a bishop who acted on the consilium and ortatus of the capitanei and the valvassores. 63 Therefore, we may deduce that bishops were also victims of the rise of capitanei and valvassores and that they lost their possessions, their jurisdictional authority, and in some cases even their lives (as did the bishop of Vicenza, Giovanni Cacciafronte, who was assassinated in 1 1 84 for having defended his church and protected the "poor" from the attack of divites et nobiles et magnates).64 At this point the sense of a struggle unleashed by the capitanei and the valvassores against the great lay and ecclesiastic authorities of feudalism is abundantly clear. They wished to replace them in the control of the terra, territoria, and comitatus (not without reason did Otto of Freising observe with amazement, "tota illa terra intra civitates ferme divisa," that the territoria became united to the civitates, which in tum claimed them as their own comitatus).lis They wished to establish themselves as lords of the land and of the castles, as "miniature kings," according to the practice and ideals of the feudal world that had given birth to them.li6 Feudal world? This seems to be a contradiction. Otto of Freising himself considered capitanei and valvassores "citizens," or better, heirs to the antiqui Romani in the art of the civitatum dispositio and the rei publicae conservatio. He regarded them as dynamic members (consules) of a collegial city govern­ ment whose main concern was the city. To that end they promoted even mere artisans to the militia, in order to subdue the diocesani and the viri magni of the territory to their will. � He was certainly not mistaken. The phenomenon of the massive migration to the city by capitanei, valvassores, and comitatini (people from the country) in general during the eleventh and twelfth centuries is well known. In Arezzo, as Jean-Pierre Delunleau has demonstrated, many landholders and heads of castra came to the city and there reinforced leur im­ plantation. 68 In addition, the boni homines of Vicenza - the leaders 01 the commune - declared their territorial origins through their names (da Sarego, 61. Cinzio Violante, La societa milanese, cit., 247. 62. Se the conunent of Fran\X>is Menant, "La societe d'ordres en Lombardie. A propos d'un livre recent," Cabiers de civilisation mUievale, X'-XII' mcles 26 (1983) 227-237, see es­ pecially pp. 232-233. 63. Giorgio Cracco, "Religione, Chiesa, pieri," in Stona di Vicenza, L'eta medievale, ed. Giorgio Cracco (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1988) 359-425, se especially p. 386. 64. Giorgio Cracco, "Ancora suUa 'Saintete en Occident' di Andre Vauchez (con un'Appendice sui Proces Cacciafronte del 1223-1224)," Studi medievali 26 (1985) 889-905, se especially 905. 65. Se n. 30. 66. Giovanni B. Verci, Stona deg/i Ecelini, I (Baso: Remonelini, 1779), cited in Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune eli famiglie a cina satellite (11 83-13 1 1 )," in Stona di Vicenza. L'eta medievale, cit., 73-1 38, se especially p. 80. 67. Se n. 30. 68 . Jean-Pierre Delumeau, "Des Lombards de Carpineto aux Bostoli," in I ceti dingenti dell'Italia comunale, cit., 67-99, se especially pp. 98-99.

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da Sossano, da Breganze, da Trissino, da Santorso, da Vivaro, and so on)." Equally well known, but considered less important, is the fact that although the capitanei and valvassores converged upon the city and established them­ selves there, they remained, more than ever, firmly anchored to the territory, to their castles, and to the holdings of the comitato. Thus, it is not possible to speak of an actual migration. Rather we must speak of a gigantic phenomenon of interaction, or rather, a type of "commuterism" between territory and city and city and territory.70 The migration to the city, then, was only a means that the capitane; and valvassores used to free themselves and acquire more power in the territory. It occurred in the cities that these groups were already accustomed to visit regularly as members of the bishops' or the count's curia. But it was only by uniting and creating a commune, not by acting separately, that it was possible for them to conquer the lay and ecclesiastic feudal author­ ity and truly become the "masters" of the territory. Up to that moment, then, the city really was a "place for transit and for establishing" the feudal forces in the territory, who were determined to gain more control of the territory itself.71 The types of conflicts that occurred in the city were consistent with this. They were conflicts that placed in opposition not social classes, but rather the partes, or political groups, that were normally an integral part of the feudal world: the bishop and his clientele against rebel­ lious vassals or against the count and his followers; one faction of nobles against another with the possible insertion of a number of the populus who were scattered among the different factions (the catalogue of potential partes in opposition could vary from city to city). These were also conflicts that arose not from interests, but rather from "certaines questions d'actualite.'>71 This is the reason for the great fluidity and precariousness of these alliances. We may find an echo of this formative phase of urban society in the later writings of the chroniclers. They spoke from within a social system that was by then clearly centered on the nobility and the people (as we will see), but they were not able to explain why, in some cities like Piacenza, divisions existed within the same class. On one hand, iIi fact, were the "milites . . . et illi de populo qui ad milites attendunt, " and on the other, ·populus . . . et illi milites qui ad populum attendunt."73 This is confirmation, however indirect, o£ the continuity of the feudal world within the heart of the city - at least until a certain era (which obviously varied from city to city). 69. G. Cracco, "Da comune di farniglie a cina satellite," cit., 73·74, 79·81. 70. Renato Bordone also agrees with the observation regarding "the simultaneous presence in the city and in the countryside" of the Milanese C4pitann demonstrated by Hagen Keller. Se La sockta cittadina del Regno d'ltali4, cit., 161. 71 . Se n. 40. 72. Jacques Van Ooteghem, "Optimates·Populares," Les Etudes Classiques 31 (1963) 406. In "Economia e societi," cit. (se n. 34) 320; Philip Jones, in order to define the conflict between nobiles and pOPNlares, "like that between patricians and plebeians in Rome," cites the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, Dimocratie en Amerique, 1111, chap. 15: "une querelle intestine entre les cadets et les ainl�S de la meme famille." 73 . Giorgio Cracco, Sockta e Stato, cit., 103·104.

324 Politics and Conflict

However, another era arrived. Through the interaction, the "com­ muterism," between the city and the surrounding territory, the capitanei and valvassores, comitatini in general, began to change. In the city they were obliged to leave the isolation of the territory and live among other people. This resulted in a loosening of blood ties and the ties of the family clans . In the city they had to be not only milites, able to fight, but also "politicians," able to speak and debate in the councils. Essentially, we are witnessing a process that - to borrow an expression from Norbert Elias - we may call the "civilization of the warrior."74 In order to govern they also had to surround themselves with experts in law and administration, in particular notaries and judges ("the only nonfeudal class . . . effectively involved in the government of the commune" ) ,15 They also had to tum to a number of operators, especially merchants, in order to supply their needs and the products necessary for urban life. As a result, the merchants began to constitute a separate category; for example, to cite just two, the ordo negotiatorum of Milan and much later, the domus mercatorum of Verona?' An urban world began to emerge. It was made up not only of nobiles but also of elements of the people who, taking advantage of favorable conditions, got ahead and became rich through their professional work; their trade, or their loans - even usurious ones (the nobility needed money for their expensive political activity). They succeeded in entering the domus of the maiores: in Vicenza, the son of a judge not only married the daughter of an aristocratic family, da Sossanos, but also assumed their name, becoming a da Sossano.77 They even infiltrated city office: in Milan, in 1 1 30, of twenty-three consuls, ten were capitane� seven valvassores, and at least five cives.78 This frightened the nobles, and they reacted by trying to close or undermine the councils as an institution and by inventing a regime unified under the podesta. This new regime was mistakenly called "foreign" but it was, in reality, art expression of the persistent solidarity between the great domus of the Po valley cities in Italy.� The people were, however, by now uncontainable. They tried to assert themselves even by using force. The "popular" uprisings that exploded above all in the early thirteenth century, for example in Vicenia�(1206), in Piacenza ( 1 21 9), in Milan, and in other cities, bear witness to this reaction.ao At this point, the city was no longer merely a place. for transit and for confirmation of feudal forces. Rather, it had become the permanent place for 74. Norbert Elias, Potere e civilra. II processo di civi/izdone, II. Per uno studio tUlia genesi sociale della civilra occidentale, Italian translation (Bologna: II Mulino, 1983) 341-343.

75. Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune eli famiglie a cina satellite," cit., 84. 76. Renato Bordone, La sociera cittadina del Regno d'Italia, cit., 1 59; John Koenig, II "popoloH delNtalia del Nord, cit., 1 86f. 77. Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune eli famiglie a cina satellite," cit., 84. 78 . John Koenig, II "popoloH dell'Italia del Nord, cit., 97. 79. Emilio Cristiani, IntrodMdone to I uti dirigenti tUll'era comunale, cit., 1 -12, se es­ pecially pp. 2-3. 80. John Koenig, II "popoloH tUll'Italia del Nord, cit., 33f., 53f., l00f.; Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune di famiglie a cina satellite," cit., 86-88.

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confrontations between forces who, by then, identified themselves as "belong­ ing to the city" or as being predominandy urban (if not actually " bourgeois" ): the nobles on the one hand and the people on the other. We may infer that the conflicts of the first phase tended to preserve the urban system almost as if the people did not want to destroy the acistocracy but simply stand by it or create a place for themselves under it. However, we decisively enter a new phase when the people organized themselves in societates or in their own communitates and demanded a part or even all of the city posts. To explain at least in a preliminary way (because available research is too scacce) this "second phase" - that of the "emergence of sepacate plebeian bodies," to quote E. J. Bickerman81 - reference to the case of Venice is helpful only up to a certain point. In Saint Mack's city, thanks to the oudet provided by the Fourth Crusade and the growth of a society that was homogeneously mercantile in nature, neither a comune populi (as in Pisa) nor open conflicts between populares and nobles (as even in Genoa) appeac.12 However, certain aspects of the vicissitudes of many cities of the Terraferma ace significant in themselves and worthy of comment. First, it is extremely difficult to distinguish within any of these urban centers conflicts that can be described as a "classic confrontation between the bourgeoisie - which was compelled to find an alternative to the old commune since it had been denied any actual political role in it - and the leading class of nobles."83 No "classic confrontation" existed; but not because conflicts themselves were nonexistent or because the nobles and the people were not continually the protagonists of them (the sources assure us of this), but because the physiognomy both of the people and the nobles (at least for most of the thirteenth century) still remains to be determined. It has been written that "it was not always and everywhere easy to recruit the major merchants, the money changers, and the judges to populac movements, detaching them from the old consulac acistocracy to which they had belonged for many genera­ tions. "84 This means that the people involved in the struggle were those who had not yet acquired social success or gained a political role. And in fact, in checking the lists of the people's representatives, we note that names of "new people" abound (as documentation on Piacenza has revealed ).8S It is true then that the men who, in vacious cities, organized themselves to fight against the nobles were usually pact of the people. But not al of the people were in­ volved. Certainly a portion of them - the successful - did not participate in the struggle against the nobility. This may seem pacadoxical, but the rise of

8 1 . Bias J. Bickerman, "Some Reflections," cit., 404. 82. Se the works of E. Cristiani, G. Cracco, G. Petti Balbi, cited in nn. 4, 8, 54. 83. John Koenig, Il "popolo" dell'lulia del Nord, cit., 56. ' 84. Gina Fasoli, Raoul Manselli, Giovani Tabacco, "La struttura sociale delle cina italiane dal V al XII secolo, " in Untersuchungen zur gesellschtlftlichen Struktur der mittelalterUchen StiJdte in Europtl . . . (Konstanz-Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1 966) (Vortrige und Forschungen, XI) 291-320, se especially p. 307. 85. John Koenig, Il "popolo" dell'lulia del Nord. cit., 56.

326 Politics and Conflict

the people in many cases ocurred at the expense not only of the nobility but also of the people themselves. Furthermore, we find that members of the nobility were leaders of popu­ lar societies and that they represented the people on the urban councils. This fact, far from having merely episodic or personal relevance, is symptomatic of the changes taking place with the noble class. Even though extensive prosopographic research is lacking, it is difcult to state that an automatic continuity of the noble class existed in the first commune during the thirteenth century. Obviously, not an inconsiderable number of families declined or became impoverished and fell into anonymity, through the constant commut­ ing between city and territory. Other families, unable to adjust to urban life, ended up returning to their homes in the territory. Meanwhile, a newly successful nobility came into being. This class, through the founding of a societates milieum, seemed to be the most active to collectively defend its own privileges. The urban nobility that confronted the people was not the whole nobility but only the most advanced and in some ways the most " bourgeois" part of it. Luigi Simeoni hypothesized with regard to Verona even the existence of a "noble-merchant" party. a6 If we examine the interests at stake, it is equally difficult to distinguish a clear division between the people and the nobility. For example, the people is not at all identifiable with the mass of artisans on the one hand or with the groups of merchants on the other. Even though the people existed also in cities, where the above-mentioned groups were not important (as in Vicenza), the distance that separated the merchants and the members o{ the art; maggiori (major guilds) -the so-called popolo grasso from artisans and members of the art; minor; (minor guilds), "who earned their livelihood with the labor of their own hands" is well known.'7 Therefore a conflict within the people itself began to take shape. It would be, however, a mistake to identify the nobility as a class of land- and house-owners who parasitically exploited the work of citizens and peasants by taking advantage of their ability to influence the commune. There were also nobles directly involved in trade and in the trade guilds (even, perhaps, in surprising numbers).88 Theref6t it is correct to sur­ mise that differences also existed within the noble class (l have already men­ tioned the fact that nobles headed popular movements). .' The fluctuation or variety of the social formulations led to an extreme fragility of the commune, which was constantly shared out among the various groups. A new factor of primary importance, the reemergence of certain powerful domus in the territory, further aggravated the fragility of the com­ mune. In the Verona and Treviso Marca, the rival factions of the da Romano and Estensi families (it was actually Ezzelino II's dream that his domus be more powerful than the Paduan commune) established themselves in the city and -

86. Quoted in J. Koenig, II "papolo" dell'1talia del Nord, cit., 199. 87. Se n. 84. 88. Philip Jones, "Economia e societ&, cit. (n. 34) 328 and passim. n

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actively participated in its internal struggles. In Pisa, the Visconti family allied themselves with the people in order to fight the Gherardeschi family.89It is not surprising, then, if persons from the great feudal tradition appeared in the ranks of the podesta. All this leads us to reject the possibility that actual "class" conflict ­ that is, the people on one side and the nobles on the other - may have occurred in the city-state of the early thirteenth century. Instead, the struggles that were differently and inconsistently structured between groups at the top of society lead one to think of "party" conflicts (partes in the sense given to this term by contemporary sources). Consequently, there was no victory either of the people or of the nobles. Rather, the struggle resulted in the birth of a broader ruling class, made up as much of nobles as of " successful" people who, by that time, were on an equal footing with regard to divitiae and bonoTes. The mixture was extremely volatile. Beneath them, only the people involved in the trades remained on the margin, but the more dynamic the political and economic situation of the city (and this is the case of Florence), the more this class made great strides within the society of magnates.90 And yet, immediately after the beginning of the second half of the thir­ teenth century, the scenario changed unexpectedly. Guild members ended up in the highest ranks of the city-state and even identified with it: comune et populus was the formula typically adopted. Its leaders were the antiani (obvi­ ously men of the people). Parallel to this, representatives of big magnate families appeared as urban podesta: in Cremona Uberto Pallavicino, in Parma Ghiberto da Gente, in Verona Mastino della Scala. In Milan, even though the podesta was someone else, the actual leader was Filippo della Torre. In Vicenza the leader was the bishop himself, Bartolomeo. Even in Venice, an idyllic situation between the guild members and the doge, Lorenzo Tiepolo, was formed. The well-known case of Bologna - where the Geremei family held the city under its domination - need not even be mentioned.91 The reasons for this change are complex and still need investigation. Let us think, for example, of the enormous presSures placed on the city-states from 1230 to 1250 by the struggle between the empire and the papal regime, which caused a consequent aggravation of internal conflicts. We should also bear in mind some of its other effects: the enormous loss of men and re89. Michele Luzzatti, Firenze e I'area toscana," in Staria d'Itali«, cd. G. Galas, VIY 1, cit., 700-701. 90. In Florence w e ma y note a certain delay in the nobility-people conflicts (se ibid., 706-707). lbat the popolo did not coincide with the trade guilds but was rather "a movement organized i n armed societates with a neighborhood-based recruitment and having estially "

elitist and political characteristics" is also evident. Se Roberto Greci, "Fonne di organizzazione del lavoro nelle cina italiane tra eta comunale e signorile," in La dna in Italia e in Germarria nel MedWevo: cultura, istituzior, vita religiosa, ed. Reinhard E1ze and Gina Fasoli (Bologna: n Mulino, 1981) 81-1 16, se especially p. 89. With regard to Perugia se Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, n Comune popolare," in Societa e istituzioni dell'Italia comunale, cit 41-56. 91. John Koenig, II "popolo" dell'Italia del Nord, cit., 296-297, 373-374; Giorgio Cracco, Societa e Stata, cit., 243f.; id., "Da comune di famiglie a cina satellite," cit., 114-1 16. "

.,

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sources (in Florence Frederick IT's support made possible the triumph of certain families that were allied with the guild members; in Venice, the hostility of Frederick himself caused the fal of Giacomo Tiepolo's government).91 Let us think of the destructive and leveling action by Ezzelino il da Romano against the large and middle-sized families of the Marca.'l Moreover, in this period economic growth started to slow down and signs of a crisis to be perceived. There no longer was enough room for everybody. The stronger people pushed aside the weaker. The mercatores tended to exploit the artifices, and the entre­ preneurs the wage earners. The city, in many ways, tried to subjugate the countryside (the liberation of the serfs was one of these ways).'" The combination of these factors, together with the endemic instability of the urban world, caused a contraction in the ruling class. Many families fell. Others returned, beaten, to their castles and their possessions in the territory from which they had originally come (later sources still contain traces of this sizable reduction)." Not many families were able to survive. Those that did eventually became masters of the city and the territory, thereby exhibiting a power never seen before, which was frequently abused: these were the families of magnates. In the late-thirteenth century, when the large and varied ruling class had been reduced, and the growth of the so-called (and, we might add, improperly called) urban democracy had been interrupted, the social landscape seems notably simplified: on the one hand the magni homines and on the other the people." Thus the focus of the conflicts became obligatory: people versus mag­ nates and magnates versus people. At first or at certain pojnts the people seemed victorious. The /upi rapaces were thrown out and laws against the magnates proliferated everywhere.'7 Was it the "triumph" of the "plebeians," as Bickerman wrote, over the aristocracy?" Actually, the rise of the people did not determine at all the eclipse of the "magnate class" but, instead, installed a more rigid selection process for the forces that ruled society ( "reguntur per paucos divites," wrote Bartolus di Sassoferrato with regard to Venice and Florence). It caused society to become f · C -.

92. Se n. 89; Giorgio Cracco, Sociera e Stato, cit., 173f. 93. Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune di famiglia a cina satellite," cit:, 104f. 94. Regarding the problem of the liberation of the serfs - but not for the economic

crisis, which remains an open problem - se Francesca Bacchi, "La cina e I'organizzazione del territorio in eta medievale," in La citra in [talia e in Germania, cit., 51-80, se especially pp.

74-75. 95 . Giorgio Cracco, "Da comune di famiglie a cina satelllite," cit., 137-138. 96. I would like to recall the definition of "magnates" of Philip Jones, "Economia e societA," cit., (n. 34) 322: not a social category but a political and changeable one that

contained only partly nobles and only a part of the nobility. 97. Se n. 4; Gina Fasoli, "Oligarchia e ceti popolari nelle cina padane ira iI XII e iI XIV secolo," in AristocTtWa cittadina e ceti popolari nel taTOO Medioello in [talia e in Germania, ed. Reinhard Flze and Gina Fasoli (Bologna, 1984) 1 1-39, se especially p. 23 f.; Silvana Collodo, "Magnati e c1ientela partigiana nel Comune Padovano del Duecento," Museum Patavinum 4 (1986) 103-1 18, se especially pp. 108-1 1 1 . 9 8 . Flias J. Bicker, "Some Reflections," cit., 404-405.

Cracco: Social Structure and Conflict

329

more and more aristocratic." The popolo minuto (lower class) lost irrevoca­ bly in the long run. Under the rule of the "greats," they had been able to riot and could even obtain power (a case in point is the Ciompi in Florence), but in the end, they were forced to submit: "They had nothing with which to sustain themselves. " lOO In light of the processes that I have outlined here (notwithstanding at­ tempts to rationalize, every city remains an individual case that, in addition, always needs to be studied in connection with the social sphere of the territory), a different conclusion seems to be indicated: a complex urban society emerged from the conflicts that arose within the feudal world.lOl On the other hand, those conflicts that arose within the urban society gave rise to a state that was not completely closed or lacking mobility at its summit but that, at its base, did not allow any dialectic.lOl The era of the communitas, with all its turbid and confused aspects, which were often also conflictual, gave way to the era of the auctoritas, which was supremely and mercilessly equalizing.1OJ

99. Philip Jones, "Economia e Societa," cit. (n. 34) 332; G. Cracco, Societa e Stato, cit., 399; James S. Grubb, "Patriziato, nobilta, legittimazione: con particolare riguardo al Veneto," in Istiturioni, societa e potere nella MaTca trevigiana e veronese (secoli XIII-XIV). Sulle tracee d; G. B. Verci. Atti (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medioevo, 1988) 235-251, se especially p. 235. 100. Victor Ruttenburg, Popolo e movimenti POPl1lari, cit., 258. 101. Se, for example, besides Paolo Cammarosano, "Citti e campagna," cit. (n. 10), .

•

.

Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, "Les rappo�ts viUe-campagne dans I'Italie communale: pour une revision des problemes," in La ville, la bourgeoisie et la genese de l'etat moderne (XIl"-XVIIl" f;ecles) (Paris, 1988) 21-34; Gerard Rippe, "n 'Catastico di Ezzelino' e la storia del Veneto medioevale," in II Catastico d; S. Giustina di Monselice detto di welina, ed. Luigi Caberlin, Fonti per la stOM della Teraferma Veneta, 1 (Padua, 1988) ix-xxiii; S. Bortolami, "Comuni e heni comunali nelle campagne medioevali: un episodio della Scodosia di Montagnana (padova) nel XII secolo," MEFRM 99.2 (1987) 555-584, se especially p. 557 (where the author recalls the words written by Gaetano Salvemini in his Un comune 1J4rale del secolo XIII: "If the trunk of our civilization greens and flowers in the large inhabited centers, the sap that nourishes the tree is almost all sucked drop by drop from the countryside"). 102. Anthony Molho, "Politics and the Ruling Qass in Early Renaissance Florence,"

Nuova Rivista Storica 52 (1968) 401-420. 103. Denis Romano, Patricians and "Popolani," The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaisance State (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, -1987), se especially pp. 141ff. Se also Mario Ascheri, "Siena nel Rinascimento: dal govemo di 'popolo' al govemo nobiliare," in I ceti dirigenti nella Toscana del Quattrocento, Monte Oriolo (Ro­ rence: Papafava, 1987) 405-430. -Thanks to Ermelinda Campani and Christine Andrade for their translation of this esy from Italian.

Commentary

H A R RY W. P LEKET

�CIENT

HISTORIANS used to invest most of their time in the study of Rome and Athens. The reasons are obvious. The combined literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources are numerous and fertile, and a slight classicistic bias is perhaps never absent. The result is that if later preindustrial historians look back at the ancient world at all, they look back at Rome and Athens and, it must be admitted, often do not find problems raised and answers provided that are relevant to their own studies. Not that there is something wrong with these cities, but there is a problem: they are rather abnormal, atypical cities, at least in their fully developed shape. Economically they are conquest states and derive most of their wealth from what Weber so nicely called "Raubimperialismus" and, in the case of Athens, from the inconceivably lucky find of lots of silver. Politically they are centers of an empire, which cannot be said of many ancient cities; moreover, Athens is completely atypical, nay, even unique in developing a radical de­ mocracy that made life for the elite more difficult (and rightly so) than in any other preindustrial European city. So at first sight these two ancient cities do not seem to offer the best cases for comparative purposes. Florence was a booming Weberian produc­ " tion city (one of the "famous weaving towns, . to use Arthur H. M. Jones' expression),! and Venice was an equally booming commercial, maritime center, though the importance of landed estate as a respectable investment is not to be underestimated, and consequently the modem, historiographical image of these cities as (proto) capitalistic entities may have to be played down some­ what. Marvin Becker's words deserve to be quoted: "Businessmen remained country proprietors at heart; their patrimonies were frequently diversified among rustic estates, city shops, and townhouses. Their status system was still profoundly agrarian and therefore a substantial share of profits from trade and manufacture went back into the land." 2 Richard Rapp showed for Venice that at least in the seventeenth century the Venetian elite increasingly invested

1 . Arthur H. M. Jones, The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Ad­ ministrative History, ed. Peter A. Brunt (Oxford, 1974) 355. 2. Marvin B_ Becker, Florence in Transition I (Baltimore, 1967) 1 4-15.

332 Politics and Conflict

their money in land and country houses. The security and the satisfactory level of the revenues of landed estate prompted them to divert their money from the invariably risky, insecure investment in commercial enterprise to land. Admittedly Rapp argues that the elite's decision reflected a mentality of rational decision making rather than a "Rentner" mentality, but this rational­ ity is a far cry from the rationality of modem capitalistic, industrial, and commercial entrepreneurs.3 Though both cities disposed of a large territory, their economic position is not to be compared with that of Athens and Rome, which were truly imperial states. Comparison with Athens and Rome in their pre-imperial stage seems more obvious, but for those periods there is a dearth of evidence. Rome certainly never was a production city; nor was it ever an important commercial, wealth-generating harbor, transit or otherwise. Ostia admittedly became Rome's harbor. But through Ostia mainly imports were channeled toward Rome: imports that were partly the profits of "Raubimperialismus," namely taxes in kind; partly they were paid for from the profits of empire, that is, from imperial and aristocratic wealth, derived from huge landed estates, spread all over the empire, and from indirect involvement in manufac­ turing, commerce, and real estate business. Athens did have an important commercial harbor, but the problem with Athens remains that we still do not know exactly enough how Athens paid for its considerable imports. Quite apart from this focus on Athens and Rome, it looks as if compara­ tive ancient history so far has been mainly comparative economic history or rather comparative history of the economic mentality and global economic systems of Greece and Rome. Whether we take Michael Rostovtzeff or Moses Finley, they both implicitly or explicitly identify (Rostovtzeff) or contrast (Finley) the ancient world with stages of the later preindustrial European world; an intermediary group Gohn D'Arms, Keith Hopkins, Thomas Schleich) seems to narrow down the gap somewhat, but in the end they either argue that the diferences were still substantial or simply fail to give an ultimate judgment.4 If anywhere, surely here is a very fruitful artd--rewarding complex of problems for comparatists. For our present purposes it may suffice to state in a rather apodictic way that the study of medieval �d Ancien Regime society and economy badly needs a less modernizing and teleological approach that ceases to interpret the economy systematicaly as a forerunner to modem capitalism. Long-distance trade and flourishing weaving towns have nothing 3. Richard T. Rapp, "Real Estare and Rational Investment in Early Modem Venice," Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979) 269-290; d. also Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Adantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1979) 61 -62, for an analysis of the reasons why merchants and entrepreneurs regularly decided to

put some of their capital into real estate. 4. For the references, d. Hary W. Pleket, "Urban Elites and the Economy of the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire," Munstersche Beitrilge %ur antiken Handelsgeschichte 3.1

(1984) 3-35.

Pleket: Commentary

333

to d o with modern capitalism. Post h oc i s not propter h oc . Whether w e take transport systems, technology, organization of production, markets, or farming techniques, A. R. Bridbury's words deserve to be pondered: "The most striking feature of the economic institutions of medieval life is how like they were to those that we find both earlier and also later in European history." This is not to deny change, especially in relation to the situation in the Dark Ages, but "many things can change without anything developing. " Those who prefer to believe in commercial capitalism are well advised to realize that "the extraor­ dinary achievements of such international marketing ventures did nothing to rescue them from ultimate sterility. "s Alain Caile recendy caled this commerce a "commerce d'aventure. '" In short, the medieval world should be less "mod­ ernized," the world of the Roman Empire made less "primitive" .7 As far as I know, in political history litde comparison has been practiced. In his recent Politics in the Ancient World, M. L Finley seems to have extended the comparison of his Ancient Economy into the field of political theory: he contrasts the entire ancient world with the late-medieval successor insofar as the former is said never to have raised the question of the legitimacy of political rule, whereas the latter did.' Unfortunately, this thesis is rather ab­ stract and very general. I believe, as I once wrote in a review of another publication of FinleY, that the thesis possibly is extreme.' The main problem, however, lies elsewhere: Finley operates with a definition of "city " and "political system, " which strangely enough betrays a rather classicistic bias and moreover is not conducive to comparison: it is mosdy Athens, a couple of other classical poleis, and republican Rome that comply with the most important criterion, namely, that of political participation. In this way the entire world of Hellenistic and Roman cities is excluded a priori; this entails the unfortunate view, possibly not realized by Finley himself, that true cities did not exist in the Middle Ages and Ancien Regime; for in those periods active political partici­ pation of the citizens surely was negligible in most cities. A more functional approach toward the phenomenon of the city, in which matters such as size, economic role, outward appearance, and political structure play an essential role, clearly is to be recommended.tO Turning to the essays in this section of our volume, I do not claim to have succeeded in bringing them all under one common denominator; but I

5. A. R. Bridbury, "Markets and Frem in the Middle Ages," in B. L. Anderson and A. J. H. Latham, The Market in History (London, 1987) 79-1 19, especially pp. 91, 95, and 98. 6 . A. Cail, "L'emprise du marche, in M. Aymard et al., Lire Braudel (paris, 1988) 93n

132, especially pp. 112-1 1 3. 7. For this thesis d. H. W. Pleket, "Wirtschaftsgeschichte der romischen Kaiserzeit, in Handbuch der EuropiJischen Sozial- und W;,tschaftsgeschichte I (Sruttgart, 1990) 25-160 pasim. 8. Cantbridge 1983, to be read with C. Meier's detailed review in Gnomon 58 (1986) 496-509. 9. Cf. H. W. Pleket, Review of M. I. Finley, Authority and Legitimacy in the Clasical City-State (Copenhagen, 1982) in Gnomon 55 (1983) 459-461 . 10. Cf. Frank Kolb, Dil Stadt im AlterIJ4m (Munich, 1984) 15; d. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500-1800 (London, 1984) 1 1 . n

334 Politics and Conflict

do believe that most touch upon basically identical problems, although the differences, in terms of concrete political institutions, magistracies, and eco­ nomic infrastructure, are manifest and manifold. One of the themes that deserves to be singled out for discussion is the phenomenon of the ruling elite and its composition: what does ruling elite mean; who constitutes that elite and to what extent, if any, are its political color and mentality affected by the incorporation of new men (homines novi)? Whether one reads Erich Gruen, John Najemy, or Giorgio Cracco, one is struck by the fact that they agree on the clearly oligarchic character of power. This is true irrespective of whether we talk about the beginning of the Roman Republic, Florence, Venice, or later stages. When we take the beginning of urban history we can say about the medieval Italian city-republics at large and probably also about Venice and Florence that the Picenne thesis, insofar as it is at all designed for and applicable to the world of northern Italy, is out of favor.11 In his brief survey Daniel Waley emphasizes the predominance of landowners in the elites of the nascent cities.12 In his contribution Cracco defends the same view: it was the feudal landlords (capitanei), their vassals (valvassores), and the plebs of arti­ sans and traders who made up the incipient city well before the twelfth century A.D. The extramural feudal landlords, or at least a number of them, decided to settle in the eclesiastical-administrative centers and began to SUPpOl.i: local traders financially. Conflicts within the group of rural, feudal magnates caused some of them to settle in the towns; such conflicts thus lie at the root of the city. In origin these cities do not seem to have foreshadowed later mercantile capitalism, let alone modem capitalism. Gradually traders, who borrowed money from the urbanized landlords, became richer, managed to penetrate into the elite, and began to develop a sort of "imitatio domini" behavior: they adapted themselves to the political culture of the landed magnates. It is already in this early stage that, according to Cracco, the political style of the elite in the emerging cities began to change: "the civilization of the warrior" took place. It is, I think, not so much the piecemeal incorporation of wealthy novi homines of the popolo that brought about this politicai 'domestication of the rural magnates. Imitatio domini implies a noninnovative behavior on the part of the imitators. Rather, it is taking up residence in towns and the confrontation with the popolo that were responsible for the change from feudal warlord into something like representative of the commune. Najemy does not seem to describe this political style exactly along the lines of Cracco; in fact he describes 1 1 . Cf. Lis and 5oly, Poverty and Capitalism (n. 3) 9: "The rise of new towns and the expansion of the old was clearly not the result of the revival of international trade, as Henri Pirenne postulated"; Pirenne's view "ignores the decisive importance of the rural economy"; d. also Adriaan A. Verhulst, "The Origins of Towns in the Low Countries and the Pirenne Thesis," Past and Present 122 (1989) 3-35. 12. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, 2nd. ed. (London, 1978) 3-15, 65-67, 95. Jacques Heers, Le clan familial au Moyen Age (Paris, 1974) throughout his book emphasizes the rural origin and interests of early medieval urban elites.

Pleket:

Commentary

335

the Florentine oligarchs of circa 1250 as a warrior class of wealthy families, characterized by frequent vendettas, violence, intimidation, and grandezza. In his view it was not until the fourteenth century that the elite abandoned the warrior ideology in favor of that of the good citizen. In Najemy's view this change was due to the influence of ideas of the popolo. A compromise seems possible here: the domestication of the tenth to the twelfth century A.D. was much more superficial than that of the fourteenth century A.D. Admittedly, the feudal lords of the former period began to adopt an urban life�style. From time to time they saw themselves even confronted with demands and riots of the popolo, but essentially the " civilization" was a rather thin veneer, under­ neath which the original features of the independent, rural warlord soon became visible. It was not until the rise of intense and persistent popular movements and ideologies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. that the veneer began to develop into a solid crust of urbanized and civilized political behavior. Whatever ORe may think of this compromise, Cracco and Najemy seem to have two points in common: first the view that oligarchy was the only possible political system, and second the insight that occasionally the popolo made its restrictive but benign influence felt on the elite, which re­ sulted first in the urbanization and politicization of the elite, and later in its democratization. Incorporation of novi homines led to occasional conflicts within the elite; it hardly led people to question the system of elite rule as such, except perhaps for a few brief periods of popular government in Florence. Cracco points out that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. it was not necessarily always the homo novus who acted as representative or champion of the interests of the popolo; members of the old nobility did not shrink from playing that role as well. What matters is that, in spite of occasional sympathy of new men or old nobles for the popular cause, oligarchy continued to reign supreme. The ancient historian is familiar with this political configuration. Is he also familiar with the violence that the oligarchy showed against the people, and with the internal vendettas, as emphasized by Najemy? In fact, we find ourselves confronted here with the important problem of the relation between the private and the public: to what extent was the Florentine city as a public entity capable of imposing its monopoly of violence ("Gewaltmonopol" ) upon its citizen members; to what extent were private families capable of discounting this public monopoly and choosing their own system of self-help and private violence? The question, of course, is with which stage of Roman republican history this configuration is to be compared: the stories about violence and intimidation, about members of the oligarchy using their own armed clientelae, and of piecemeal incorporation of homines novi into the elite remind me of the early republic between, let us say, 500 and 300 B.C.13

13. Cf. Kurt A. Raaflaub, "The Conflict of the Orders in Archaic Rome: A Comprehen­ sive and Comparative Approach," in id. (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspec­ tives on the Conflict of the Orders (Berkeley, 1986) 28.

336

Politics and Conflict

In Greece we have parallels for oligarchic violence, private armies, and vendettas in the cities of the early archaic period, in which the public sphere admittedly existed but depended too much on the benevolence of powerful clans instead of being capable of rapidly imposing public rules and procedures upon al citizens, wealthy and poor.14 Similar features emerge again in the pe­ riod of the demise of the senatorial Roman Republic, when the border line between private potentes and res publica became increasingly vague. A common feature of both the Italian city-republics and early republican Rome is the rise of nouveaux riches, of homines novi, who originally did not belong to the patriciate (equites) and the urbanized rural landowners (the group of knightslmilites pro comni, the societas militum, as Waley has it), but managed to penetrate it.15 Waley mentions the category of ennobled wealthy popolani, a striking parallel to wealthy Roman plebeians who managed to acquire membership of the Roman senatorial ordo. Since the 7IOvi happily adapted themselves to the noble life-style, it was only the composition of the oligarchy that changed, and hardly the political culture. What change there was in mentality may have been due, along the lines set out by Najemy, to the confrontation with the popolo/plebs. From Cracco's chapter I infer that in an early stage the popolo began to offer military support to the urban elites (the militia of the vile artigiani); Waley refers to the infantry of urban and rural non-nobles. This irresistibly reminds me of the early republican plebs, who in addition to large numbers of debt-ridden, small subsistence peasants and tenants, also comprised a number of farmers and craftsmen, wealthy enough to serve as infantrymen in the legions. Cracco and Najemy share one important point of vie�: the impact that confrontation with a political alternative, or at least with an adversary, exerted on the social behavior and political mentality of the elite. In this respect Oto of Freising's picture of the capitanei and valvassores as citizens, heirs of the antiqu; Romani and masters in the art of civitatum dispositio and res publicae conservatio is very relevant. Taking up residence in the city and being con­ fronted with the common people meant that the elite exposed itself to the civilizing influence of the urban cives. The same procesfis described by Najemy for thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence, with greater intensity and

14. B ut in the end, as Raaflaub points out (d. n. 13) aristocracy changed considerably and lost much of its total conttol of the community; in comparison with Rome, from early on the Greks began to question the superiority of the aristocracy; the latter engaged in factional striCe and showed a god deal of arbittariness in jurisdiction and abuse of their power, but ultimately they were subdued to a more democratic, popular system. 15. Waley, City-RepNblia (n. 12) 17-20, 42 . It is worthy of note that in Florence newcomers were regularly stigmatized as being "from the trowel and the plough-their minds filled with insatiable avarice and pride" (Boccaccio, quoted by Marks, art. cit. [no 26] 79). In Rome new men were generally described as infimNS. humi/is. obscunu. The psychology of the Florentine and Roman establishments is the same in this respect. Needles to say, as son as noll had managed to entrench themselves in the nobility, they adopted this habit of slighting newcomers. CE. T. P. Wiseman; New M4m in the Roman Ser.au 139 B.c.-14 A.D. (Oxford, 1'971) 65-94 (obscuro loco ""IUs), especially p. 82.

Pleket: Commentary

337

more democratization.Preindustrial elites seem to have been subject to waves of homines novi and of domestication due not to these novi but rather to con­ frontation with alternative organizations. It is the crest of the waves that differs: obviously the crest of Craco's wave of the "civilization of the warrior" and of Freising's wave of "republicanized" rural lords. (d. conservatio rei publicae) is less high than that of Najemy's wave a couple of centuries later, but basically it is the same sort of political wave. I have two questions concerning the economic background of the above­ mentioned movements.First, what was the reason that rural, feudal landown­ ers began to settle in the early-medieval city in northern Italy? As far as I can see it was primarily discord among the rural nobility that prompted some of them to leave the world of those nobles and to try to acquire power with the help of the inhabitants of the urban nucleus. The urbanized nobles were not attracted by prospects of mercantile or artisanal wealth; nor did they become merchants and entrepreneurs themselves. They setded in a city for political reasons, but in the long run this political decision resulted in better prospects for the nonagrarian component of the urban population. Slowly, very slowly, a few merchants or artisans managed to acquire some wealth, supported by the urban landowning elite, who needed their help against their feudal col­ leagues in the countryside.In their turn some of the urban landowners became involved in nonagrarian activities. In short, a political decision by landowners gradually brought about the rise of wealthy, nonagrarian nov� who wanted to share political power and to occupy political functions. This brings us to our second question: how do we explain the fact that, whereas in medieval northern Italy the novi seem to originate in the world of merchants and successful artisans, in Rome the wealthy plebeian nov; generally are held to have been agrarian nouveaux riches. I quote Raaflaub: "Equally wrong is the related assumption that the early republican plebeians (and accordingly the plebeian hoplites) were mosdy petty craftsmen, traders and workers, in the city."i' Even Chester Starr, whose main thesis is that Rome in the fourth century B.C. developed into a busy·center of crafts and trade and that in its foreign policy the Roman elite was at least pardy influenced by commercial factors, concedes that "the new families ...were surely agricul­ turally based"; the view that "they rose out of commerce and industry is an unwarranted importation of modem concepts of the bourgeoisie."17 I do not accept the view that in this period Rome had to export nonagrarian products in order to be able to pay for substantial grain imports, in other words that Rome was a sort of Weberian production city; conquest rather than import will have solved most logistic problems.18 I do find it likely, however, that in Rome a substantial nonagrarian sector must have come into 16. "From Protection and Defence to Offence and Participation: Stages in the Conflict of the Orders," in Raaflaub, Social Struggles (n. 1 3) 223. 17. Chester G. Star, The Begi",ngs of Imperial Rome: Rome in the Mid-Republic (An Arbor, 1980) 57. 1 8_ Cf. my review of Star in Mnemosyne 36 (1983) 442-446.

338

Politics

and Conflict

existence, whose main function was to cater to the needs of the growing Roman market; but somehow this does not seem. to have produced any numbers of commercial nouveaux riches. I subscribe to Starr's view that the nov; homines were "drawn from rural elements who took advantage of the increasingly market-oriented economy";l' this must imply that they derived their wealth from the marketing of their agricultural surpluses. The explanation for this difference in background of the nov; in medieval Italy and in ancient Rome may perhaps be found (a) in the clearly imperialistic character of Rome, which enabled both the ruling elites and those just below them to acquire much land at the expense of the conquered and as a source of increasing wealth, and (b) in the strong focus on indirect participation of the elite in commerce and industry. By indirect participation I mean both lending and the habit of setting up slaves or freedmen in workshops or commerce. In this respect I wonder whether the sons of freedmen whom Appius Claudius proposed to admit to the senate may have had fathers who obtained their wealth both from the financial support of their former masters (as Trimalchio did later) and from their own commercial andlor entrepreneurial activities.10 Subsequently the sons did what was indispensable to become not only wealthy but above all respectable: they bought land - thereby in a remarkable way anticipating the later preindustrial European "law of the three generations," as described by Pirenne and further elaborated by Braudel and Hexter.11 If that is acceptable, growth on the nonagrarian side of the economy was not auto­ matically translated into the birth of a mercantile andlor entrepreneurial elite; on the contrary, the growth both reinforced the agrarian elites who derived additional revenues from the activities of their slaves and freedmen and created at best a pseudo-bourgeoisie of wealthy freedmen. There is, however, a diference between Rome and the medieval northern Italian cities: whereas in most of the latter small numbers of the nonagrarian rich themselves could penetrate into the elite and in some exceptional cities Weberian production cities - gradually even came to dominate the elire, in Rome nonagrarian wealth did not manifest itself directly in social status and corresponding membership of the socio-political elite, butiiltely did provide the basis for membership in the second or third generation. It must be emphasized that not every North Italian ptedieval city was a Florence or Venice, that is, a city with strong entrepreneurial and commercial features. Waley rightly points out that most cities were small, face-to-face towns with well under 20,000 inhabitants,l1 caught in a narrow circuit of eco-

19. Starr, op. cit. (n. 17) 46. 20. Cf. Starr, op. cit. (n. 17) 35. 21. Cf. Henri Pirenne, "Les periodes de I'histoire sociale du capitalisme," Bulleti" de l'Acadbnie royale de Belgique, CI. des Lettres 1914; for Hexter (and Braudel) cf. J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals i" History: New Views on History and Society i" Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1961). For a good survey cf. Ma Prak, ArislOa'atisering," Spiegel Historitul23 (1988) 226232. 22. Waley, City-Republics (n. 12) 3-4, 15. II

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nomic activities with their contado and with trade mainly being a modest overland interchange of grain, oil, wine, salt, and cheap, local textiles. In most of these towns smallholders constituted the majority; most of them were just local markets for local commodities, and they were nourished by the agricultural resources of the surrounding countryside, just as was the case in most towns in the Roman Empire. Those artisans who were active in the average small medieval town used to combine several occupations and to own some land as well: hardly the representatives of a nascent capitalism but rather a return, after the demise of the Roman Empire, to average Roman city life. As to the larger medieval cities like Florence and Venice, the rural roots of commercial and entrepreneurial elites are not to be discarded. I find confirmation for this approach, which narrows the gap usually assumed to have existed between primitive antiquity and the commercial and capitalistic Middle Ages, in R. Burr Litchfield's recent Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530-1790 (Princeton, 1986). Admittedly, Litchfield points to the continuity of a nonagrarian business elite of merchants and bankers, but there is also the question of a growing reinvestment of profits in the countryside and of "a shift in patrician investments toward land." When Florence came under the sway of the Medici and their court, sons of commercial families increasingly appeared "as silent investing partners" and preferred "a safe investment" in land that "promised a steady but smaller revenue than could be obtained from trade."23 I permit myself one final excursion in the field of economic history, which is meant somewhat to elaborate and to support my thesis: in recent historiography the differences between the ancient and medieval world have been exaggerated and overemphasized. Future conferences should focus on systematic comparison of the economic infrastructure, not only of specific cities but also of the entire Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire and that of later preindustrial Europe. It is only within the context of an overall view of these two worlds that the study of specific cities or themes can be fruitful. My excursion concerns the city of �lorence. I refer to two recent articles by Richard A. Goldthwaite on Florentine local and international banking.14 These studies emphasize the relatively small size of banks, the discontinu­ ity of their operations, the small amount of capital at their disposal, and the strongly consumptive and short-term loans made by them. In short, Goldthwaite draws a picture of Florentine economic "primitivism" that would have appealed to Sir Moses Finley, were it not for the fact that he admittedly drew a similar primitive picture of ancient banking but precisely contrasted the latter with the allegedly modem, capitalistic structure of medieval banking. 23. R. Bur Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureilacy (as cited in the text) 23 ("the cluster of fanns that their prudent reinveslment of profits had gradually enlarged") 36 and 43. 24. Richard A. Goldthwaite, "Local Banking in Renaissance Florence," Journalof Euro­ pean Economic History 14 (1985) 5-55; id., "1he Medici Bank and the World of Florentine Capitalism," Past and Present 114 (1987) 3-31.

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A recent study by W. C. Jordan strikingly confirms Goldthwaite's results.2S These studies provide a good antidote to some of Raymond de Roover's "modernistic" studies of medieval banking and financing. I return to the main theme of politics and social conflicts, now focusing on the period covered by Najemy for late Florence (thirteenth- to fourteenth century) and by Gruen for the later republic. It is not easy to decide whether or not they have much in common. Both scholars accept the idea that over the centuries a relatively narrow oligarchy managed to continue its rule and that basically the nov; were imitators rather than innovators.26 Both use a comparable vocabulary, which mirrors the same approach toward politics: patronage, clientel, networks, and factions seem to have been the mechanisms of political power and to have constituted the essence of politics. Gruen seems to demur at least in one respect: in his view the use of concepts like faction and clientela suggests too much divisiveness among the elite and too little unity and ascendancy. Najemy's objection to the excessive use of concepts like patronage, clientela, and (actio is different: it reduces politics to an ulti­ mately personal and local afir, with ideology and real political issues left out. In other words, for Gruen excessive reliance on the political mechanisms mentioned above means underestimating the essential unity of the elite; for Najemy it means underestimating the contents, the ideology of politics. Pre­ sumably, Najemy would agree with Gruen's point but not vice versa. Because Najemy accepts the ultimate control of power by the oligarchy he will probably also accept the view that factionalism within the oligarchy did not essentially undermine the elite. In fact, in both periods factionalism played a crucial role in determining who should occupy the top magistracies. Here interesting parallels can be found. Gruen points out that in Rome newcomers had their best chances in the lower echelons of the senate and its magistracies, which is another way of saying that the top positions were preferably held by persons with respectable ancestors, a pedigree of at least two or three top magistrates, rather than by novi of the first generation. This reminds me of Litchfield's recent statistics, which show that 75 percent of the Florentine houses that provided four or more priorates in the fifteenth century'atready had priors in the fourteenth century. As to the members of the senate or the Council of Two Hundred, under the Medici 87 percent of the 426 houses that regularly ocupied the priorate in the fifteenth century managed to maneuver their members into those two councils and to the list of people eligible for officeP It is less easy to ascertain whether Najemy and Gruen agree on the ultimate influence that popular discourse and popular institutions exercised 25. William C. Jordan, "Women and Credit in the Middle Ages: Problems and Direc­ tions," Journal of European Economic History 17 (1988) 33-62. 26. Cf. L. F. Marks, "Fourteth-Century Democracy in Florence," Past aM Present 25 (1963) 77-84 ("The history of Florence - even at its most democratic - remains in large measure the history of her principal families"). 27. Litchfield, Emergence o f a Bureaucracy (n. 23) 16-20, 25-30.

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on the ruling oligarchy. Gruen believes in the "exploration of popular dis­ course to entrench the authority of the establishment" and correspondingly rejects the view that such popular discourse was taken up by (part of) the elite to advance popular interests; in fact, he writes about a fa�ade of popular advantage, screening the promotion of aristocratic ascendancy. The diference with Najemy lies in the assessment of the influence that popular political culture had on the nature of the aristocracy. Najemy explicitly and correctly maintains that in the long run Florentine oligarchy, though not losing its power, slowly but definitely was affected by the political discourse and institu­ tions of the po puli. The problem in Gruen's essay is that he hardly addresses himself to this problem in Najemy's terms. His main theme is the question whether or not Roman senators or part of the senate ever consciously decided to foster the advancement of popular interest by legislation or institutional innovation, thereby diminishing the power of the oligarchy. His answer rightly is at one time he admits that "Roman leaders had to take popular needs into acount, at least on occasion." But on the whole his point of view is that the senate at best manipulated or exploited popular voices, that is, popular political culture, and in doing so ultimately strengthened its oligarchical position. The latter is true, and Najemy is also of the opinion that ultimately the Florentine oligarchy likewise managed to hold its dominant position. But whereas Najemy explicitly asks whether the entrenched Florentine oligarchy perhaps was afected in its political behavior and style, Gruen seems to hold that an entrenched elite basically is an unchanged elite, that is, un­ changed in terms of political ideology and political style. This view is not likely to be true; it is what I would like to call the extremist prosopographical view of political life, inaugurated by Sir Ronald Syme: the oligarchy cared not about political ideology - except perhaps for some vague catchwords like virtus, res publica, libertas (mainly senatorial) but only about power; in the power game, factionalism played an essential role, in two variants: some believe in large, semi-permanent (actiones, others in rapidly changing groups of amici formed in res}fonse to the problems at hand. Gruen adds the dimension of the unaltered unity of the elite, which did not suffer from divisiveness, or at least not much. He does not deny the existence of popular needs, popular discourse, popular voices, or popular clamor, but in the end the united, entrenched senatorial elite merely manipulated popular impulses "while assuming the ascendancy of the nobiles." I leave aside the problem of sincerity versus sheer manipulation and exploitation of popular discourse. In fact, once in his essay Gruen himself admits that ocasionally the elite "had to take those [popular] needs into account." This little sentence, which is completely overshadowed by the vo­ cabulary of political cynicism and lust for power, constitutes a bridge to Najemy's view that the exposure to popular ideology and institutions, which formulate the needs of the popolo, in the long run may have affected the po­ litical culture of the elite.

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In the course of three or four centuries both oligarchies, the Florentine and the Roman, saw themselves confronted with the rise of popular organiza­ tions, whether we call them guild councils or popular assemblies (comitia tributa). In the field of elections the oligarchy had to get used to the idea that those who did not rank as members of the elite decided who was to be elected. True, in Florence the impact of popular concepts probably was stron­ ger than in Rome. Najemy's catalogue of institutions, procedures, and results during the various years of popular protest and government contains elements that remained unknown in ancient Rome; one such element is the admittedly temporary appointment of major and minor guildsmen in the priorate. I cannot think of anything similar happening in Rome, namely, the temporary election of minor artisans in the senatorial top functions or, for that matter, in lower magistracies. In a general sense, however, one may say that the oligarchy of Rome in 133 behaved differently from that of 495: less violence, more protection for the common man, more influence on legislation by the common man in the comitia tributa, more influence possibly on the contents of legisla­ tion. The introduction of the leges tabellariae may not have been a challenge to senatorial dominance, but it did afect the possibilities of manipulating the votes in the comitia. In this connection Cicero's famous remark in De Legibus about written ballots to be shown on request to leading citizens should be interpreted as wishful thinking rather than as a reflection of actual practice. Senatorial diehards did not like the idea that common citizens made up their own minds, but it did happen, however much they were subject to the influence of patroni.l8 In the end the demise of senatorial rule in Rome may well have been due to the fact that the senatorial elite's political culture had not responded sufficiently to popular needs and discourse. Leges agrariae and {rumentariae were grudgingly accepted and, if needs arose, expanded by the senate, but ultimately P. A.Brunt may be right in his thesis that senatorial unwillingness to distribute land among the veterans, that is, the plebs in military disguise, was the major factor in the fall of the senatorial republic.l' It is significant that the princeps quickly solved this problem; he also solYed the problem of feeding the Roman populace. The senate admittedly promulgated leges {rumentariae, but in their political culture these distrib\1tions continued to smack too much of imdesirable gifts to a lazy, parasitical plebs. Najemy argues that "the great families of Florence became a stable ruling class only when they learned to speak the language of the popolo and the guild community, a language embedded in institutions that were far more durable thart the regimes that originally promoted them." This may·be some­ what exaggerated; these families remained a stable ruling elite, inter alia, by absorbing and accommodating elements of the people's discourse. The same 28. Contra Gruen. 29. P. A. Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution," J. of Roman St. 52 (1962) 69-86.

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can be said about the behavior of the senatorial Roman elite in the years between 500 and 133 B.C. Both in Florence and in Rome ultimately a princeps emerged who in both cities continued to utilize the services of the elite for administrative purposes. I leave it to others to decide whether in both cities the elites had perhaps not accommodated enough popular discourse or whether different mechanisms were at work in these cities.

Commentary

RONALD F" WEISSMAN

T

HE HISTORY OF THE STUDY of political organization and power,

whether conceived of as political science, anthropology, or sociology, has had no richer laboratories than the classical and medieval city­ states that are the subject of this conference. From Machiavelli through Karl Marx, Henry Maine, and Max Weber the cities of Mediterranean antiquity and the Middle Ages have served as a fundamental p.oint of reference for the development of theory. Even today, the Mediterranean town, broadly con­ ceived, serves as the laboratory for much contemporary theorizing by poiitical anthropologists. I raise the issue of formal theory because the chapters in this book share a sense of unease about many of the theoretical assumptions commonly used to explain those processes which helped to organize ancient and medieval urban communities. Thomas J. Figueira is, for example, critical of what he calls "vulgar Marxism," which, in his words, is deterministic, finding in the social order "only a single pattern - exploitation by one specific class of another class or classes," to which he contrasts a sound appreciation of all "societies that balance individual appetitiveness and group self-interest against the needs (or wishes) of everyone (mediated through many social mechanisms)." For Figueira, then, even more than economic interests, it is the political tensions between individuals and the group or groups and the state that create conflict. He asks that scholars establish a spectrum from social to "purely political cotlBict" and argues further that "as time progresses in Athens conflict becomes less social (between already constituted groups) and more"a matter of individual decisions over choices in policy." Figueira concludes by distinguishing the primitive and the fully evolved polis, the latter characterized by more socio­ economic differentiation and more complex political organization. Social con­ flict characterized the early polis; a more purely political conflict characterized the politically mature polis. Finally, for Figueira, it is not the existence of features of the social structure that occasions social conflict, but, rather, the intervention of the state. While denying that ancient slavery created social conflict, since he believes that slavery was a political rather than an economic

346

Politics

and Conflict

instrument, he asserts that the power of the mature state to levy taxes was one of the truly significant causes of exploitation and conflict in ancient society. Figueira's essay makes unusual and, to my mind, unnecessary distinctions between political and economic conflict and focuses on the state as a cause of social conflict that is "political." For Figueira, political conflict is somehow logically prior to other kinds of conflict, constructing but not contrasted by the social order. Unlike Figueira's essay, which deals with many kinds of conflict, the contributions of Cracco, Najemy, and Gruen deal to a greater or lesser extent with problems relating to the nature of oligarchy and elites in Roman and late-medieval society. Theorists from Marx through Weber and onward have charted the rise of late-medieval urban communities, generally understanding them as mod­ ernizing phenomena, the triumph of city over countryside, and bourgeois over feudal values and sensibilities. Social conflict, in such a world, reflected the antithetical interests of town against countryside, freedom against feudal bondage, urban capital against agrarian landowning. In contrast with this tradition of sharp cleavage and neat "feudal" forms of social organization versus "modern" ones, for Giorgio Cracco much of late-medieval urban history exemplified, in its origins, traditional patterns of feudal conflict. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it was not the town that exercised a kind of sociocultural domination over towns. Rural elites came to view control of towns as essential to their continued domination of the coun,tryside. Moving into towns, feudal elites brought with them the patterns, habits, and conflicts of the countryside. Assimilating into the urban community and becoming civilized by it, the formerly rural nobility - maintaining all the while its strong ties to the countryside -became less of a warrior clan that fought to gain power and more of a group of urban politicians who debated and used '. the nascent forums of public discourse to dominate the commune. For Cracco, social groups within the dominant political classes were, no matter how conflictual, hard to define. With the strength'Crig of a commercial economy, a self-conscious and proud popolo emerged, contesting the privileges of the older, now half-feudal, now half-mercantile, urban nobility. But, for Cracco and for others, such groups or classes are exceedingly hard to define. To gain factional advantage, some members of the older urban aristocracy patronized elements of the parvenu popolo. At the same time, older members of the popolo, having acquired aristocratic sensibilities and having enjoyed many of the privileges, honors, and political authorities and rights of the ancient consular elite, rallied to the defense of noble factions against the baser elements of the guild community. In Cracco's analysis, here, too, conflict took the form of elite factionalism rather than clear-cut, unambiguous class conflict. A curtailment of economic opportunities after the middle of the thirteenth

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347

century placed class antagonism in greater relief, and a rift grew between all sectors of the ruling elite, old and new, on the one hand, and the popolo minuto, the lesser guildsmen and working classes, on the other. For Cracco, then, from the conflicts within the feudal world emerged a complex urban society, but from urban conflicts emerged a neofeudal state, run by an oligarchic elite. In analyses such as those Cracco offers, the concepts of city and country­ side, feudal and mercantile, urban and rural, are, at best, ambiguous and blurred, and medieval urbanization is altogether something different from the modern, neat, and rationalizing processes imagined by those who have posited that late-medieval and Renaissance Europe witnessed the transition from feudalism to capitalism understood in Marxist or Weberian terms. Erich Gruen and John Najemy locate their unease with contemporary theoretical formulations in a common source: a recent emphasis on informal sociability, on friendship and patronage. In a sense, that ancient and medieval historians have been animated by common COncerns with sociability and patronage is not as surprising as it may appear. Syme's Roman Revolution, though not inventing the methods of prosopography, had a decisive impact among ancient historians, establishing prosopography as the key to the untan­ gling of politics and power. Syme has had no less of a historiographic influence on recent Anglo-American medieval and Renaissance urban history. Through prosopographic analysis, the relations among members of an elite are thrown into detailed relief, as patterns of kinship, friendship, partnership, and clientage emerge from a mass of rich detail; and with that detail has often emerged what anthropologists have called the unofficial, "little" tradition of the social order, One committed more to personal loyalty than to abstract principle, one particularly vexing for the liberal tradition, because it expresses more faith in individuals than in humankind in general, one skeptical of universals and abstract ideologies. Through prosopographical study aild through the parallel discovery of the work of Mediterranean anthropologists, ancient and medieval historians had a rich set of data and theoretical models that were mutually supporting. And such methods and models were seen to add depth and analytical rigor to the work of earlier scholars. Work by Ottokar, for example, some sixty years ago had impressed upon Italian scholars the importance of personal networks of �ssociation in explaining the rise of the Medici in Florence. And patronage studies of the last two decades have provided a more explicit model and a vast accumulation of data to support and explain Ottokar's Florence - the late medieval community that has been studied in greatest sociological detail. Gruen's concerns about studies of Roman patronage and friendship are rooted in the use of such studies to emphasize conflict and faction among the ruling senatorial elite. For Gruen, patronage clientela may explain the shifting composition of factions, but it does not explain what for him is more striking and far more important, the "stimulus to unity." "How did the -

-

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Politics and Conflict

nobi[es sustain solidarity, hold a collective purpose, and maintain political ascendancy?" Gruen's essay deals not so much with the mechanisms by which Roman elites gained ascendancy, as with the mechaniSms by which they legitimated their rule. In addition to his skepticism about the relevance of patronage studies for the study of Roman elites, Gruen contests another trend in recent historiography, denying that elites owed their longevity to their ability to satisfy popular constituencies, their ability to respond positively to popular pressure, or their ability to curry popular favor. In Gruen's analysis, several facets of Roman politics are generaly seen to be evidence of popular influence: electoral practices, secret ballots, and the calling of popular assemblies having the authority of criminal courts. Examining the results of such practices, Gruen finds that elite power remained intact, despite them. Indeed, by com­ bining the relative invulnerability of Roman elites to any deleterious effects with the elite's public praise of such practices as evidence of the quality of Roman government, Gruen is led to conclude that those practices which were ostensibly popular were fac;ades for aristocratic rule - one might even say, though Gruen does not, mechanisms whereby popular discourse served to legitimate the hegemony of entrenched elites. It is appropriate, I think, to ask Gruen: if popular pressure is not a significant factor in republican history, why did the senatorial elite feel compelled to seek this kind of legitimation? And what threats to its own authority did such legitimation seek to curtail? Gruen's and Najemy's chapters come closest to addressing a common set of issues - the nature of political power, the character and composition of elites, and their relationship to alternative, particularly popular, ideologies and urban traditions. Like Gruen's analysis of Rome, Najemy begins his study with the examination of elite power in Florence. Like Gruen does for Rome, Najemy, too, disputes the relevance of the current fascination with systems of patronage, friendship, and informal social relations for the under­ standing of Florentine political behavior. Unlike Gruen, who appears to dt)miss the study of patronage, Najemy does not deny the importance of these relations for the study of mid-fifteenth century Medicean Florencfc:- What he does do is offer a corrective to whathe perceives as the claim by the patronage school of thought to have identified the single key to unlocking Flor,entine urban history and the history of Florentine elite behavior� What patronage and the study of informal relations do not do, he argues; is throw into adequate relief the enduring importance of formal institutions and explicit, conscious, articulated political ideologies derived from the Florentine civic tradition. In what I argue is one of the finest essays in Florentine history of the past decade, Najemy treats elite ascendancy, to use Gruen's terminology, not as inevitable but as contingent. Elite ascendancy is always possible, but it is often threatened by the guild community and by lower-class violence. Upper-class solidarity is not, as it appears to be for Gruen, taken for granted. Following Gene Brucker, Samuel Cohn, and others, in Najemy's Florence aristocrats

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learned from a century of real and potential w()rking-class discontent and violence the dangers of sectarian splits among the members of the ruling elite. For Najemy, in a manner thoroughly compatible with the view offered by Giorgio Cracco, elite identity, sensibility, and political style at the beginning of the Florentine communal experiment suffered from all of the characteristics of t.'1e traditional feudal aristocracy, recently emigrated to the city; they were exclusive, prepotent, violent, and contemptuous of the claims and aspirations of the guild community. By the end of the fourteenth century, during the beginning of long-term elite ascendancy, the Florentine patriciate had learned, after one hundred years of conflict and collaboration with the guild community, to express its aspirations in the language of the corporate commune. Like Gruen's Roman elite, the Florentine elite used rather than opposed the symbols and institutions of popular sovereignty and guild government to legitimate its own rule, becoming, as Cracco has also described, civilized and urbane. I offer only two correctives to Najemy's splendid history of elite political sensibilities. First, it should be noted that few historians have made patronage, as Najemy claims, the exclusive or universal principle animating "real" politics. Most Florentine historians, the Kents certainly among them, accept the histo­ ricity of patronage and the chronology Nicolai Rubinstein and Gene Brucker have provided for the rise of patronage systems in Florence. Always a competing tendency in Florence, patronage systems began to dominate only at the end of the fourteenth century, due to complex transformations in institutional and social relations. The chronology of elite sensibilities proposed by Najemy is one that most Florentine historians would readily accept, including those, like myself, who believe that face-to-face interaction is critical to understanding urban identity and that urban identity is much more complex than simple membership in a guild or adherence to Florentine - or any other - civic ideology. The second corrective I offer, and I suggest this to both Gruen and Najemy, is to see systems of patronage as neither necessarily divisive (as does Gruen) nor necessarily opposed to class-based interpretations of urban societ­ ies (as do both Gruen and Najemy). Some of the best work in Mediterranean anthropology, for example, has demonstrated how patronage has served to unify ruling elites and, at the same time, to fragment other social classes into cliques and factions, preventing effective opposition to elite rule from devel­ oping. Patronage often offers a personalized view of the universe in which it appears that one canot trust institutions as much as friends and protectors, and one in which it appears that social action is dangerous because the pow­ erful usually dominate. Patronage need not conflict at all with class-based interpretations of elite power. Indeed, systems of patronage may be part of an ideology that legitimates patronage and promotes the notion that collective action to change the status quo is either impossible or doomed to fail. In reviewing the materials presented here, it appears that in contrast with Athens, where oligarchical elites were less well entrenched, in ancient Rome and in medieval Italian city-states such as Florence, a clan-based honor elite

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ruled, an elite increasingly sensitive to the existence of mechanisms of popular sovereignty and to popular modes of political discourse. We know, too, that in these socially intimate, face-to-face societies, complex social relations and realities are not easily reducible to simple formulas emphasizing class, status, power, or patronage to the exclusion of other elements, cultures, and tendencies. Much remains to be done if we are to benefit from a truly comparative discourse about power and conflict in those Meditteranean societies under our review. There are problems with the points of view presented here. First, with the exception of Figueira, our discussion of power and conflict has involved almost exclusively and essentially the study of elites, and even here, such studies have generally been conducted from the perspective of elite aspirations and sensibilities. To limit our study of politics to the political classes - to those holding official power - is also a mistake, given the diffusion of behaviors and attitudes throughout urban society that are undeni­ ably political and potentially conflictual, particularly given the need to form relations between persons and groups over long distances. Many merchants, notaries, and priests in the medieval world had access to their own forms of patronage or power, given their positions as mediators between different social systems. As Peter Schneider, Jane Schneider, and Edward Hansen re­ mind us, in the regions of the Western Mediterranean the fragmentation of power ex­ tends, by and large, throughout the social system. Everywhere power seems to be in different but overlapping domains. This is an area in which individuals at all levels are politicians: they calculate, wheel and deal and intrude themselves into widely divergent spheres of action. They are celebrated for their initiative and drive, notorious for their capacity to store information about political debits and credits, and remarkably skiled at interpersonal relations. The would­ be entrepreneur in this context is always alive to opportunities for forming coalitions with others.

It is only by appreciating the extent to which the political permeated many kinds of institutions and facets of urban society � its social exchanges, its corporate relations, its interpersonal relations, its inter- and intragroup conflicts, its methods of forming political alliances - tha.t we can appreciate the true depths of political behavior and conflict in ancient and medieval city­ states. Unlike Figueira, I make little distinction between the political and the social in the study of premodern urban society. This book has not even begun to address problems of social structure and stratification beyond the limited circle of those who ruled or those who - like the new men of ancient Rome or medieval Italian towns -- could reasonably expect a chance someday to join their ranks. About those below the ruling elites, those beyond or beneath the guild community - the sottopost� the miserabili who constituted a sizable proportion of medieval and ancient urban populations, marginals such as Jews, those in formal or informal condi-

Weissman: Commentary

35 1

tions of dependency such as slaves or debtors, to name just a few groups we know very little. We have been reminded of the weakness of older forms of sociological analysis, whether such forms are based on traditional modernization models, on simple rural-urban contrasts, on simplified notions of class, or on more contemporary theories of patronage. I often feel as if we inhabit, in our own fields, two or more simultaneous worlds, in which, for example, proponents of corporate or class views of the social order admit that familial and patronal systems are important but fail to integrate such perspectives into their research, while scholars emphasizing patronage fail equally to come to terms with class or other macrosocial concerns beyond the level of interpersonal relations and dyadic or clique interactions. This blending of perspectives is especially im­ portant for those who see in medieval and ancient societies a strong corporate ordering or presence, for corporate groups, too, were often animated by intragroup pressures and factions and were themselves made up by personal patterns of recruitment. One need only recognize the frequency with which Florentine confraternities were suppressed for their meddling in politics and their transformation into patronage cliques manipulating elections for friends, to recognize how fuzzy the distinctions between patronage and corporation were, at least at times of political turmoil. We must begin to reconstruct a complete sociology of city-state and not confuse parts for wholes. We have not said, for example, that patronage, class, political institutions, civic ideologies, patrilineage, corporate identity, personal honor, or social status is irrelevant or unimportant for the study of ancient and medieval urban society. What we have said is that each, of itself, offers only a partial window into the past, and that a complete view of medieval or ancient city-states must seek to integrate each of these facets into a more coherent explanation of belief, practice, and experience.

The City of Athens: Space, Syr.nbo� Stnlcture

TON IO H O LS CHER

I NTRODUCTION CIlY is the most important focus of cultural life.1 As such it serves three purposes.2 First, it satisfies all basic needs of communal and personal life. Second, it gives this life an explicit meaning. Third, it shapes and mirrors the general structure of life. These three aspects are in­ separable and must be viewed in relation to each other: the city is simulta­ neously a natural space and a structure that provides meaning, an essential condition and an all-embracing symbol, a total environment and a monument of society. On the one hand, the city provides the necessities: a place to live, shelter from weather, streets for communication and transportation, food supply, acces to fields and pastures, market places, water supply through wells or pipelines, removal of refuse and garbage, places for handicrafts in houses and workshops, supply and transport of materials, and protection from outside enemies. These functions mark the city as a living-space: they are the subject of descriptive sociology. On the other hand, there are the institutions and monuments that the community uses in reminding itself of its own identity: shrines and temples of

1. lbroughout this chap1le1', I use the following abbreviations: Boersma, Building Policy J. S. Boersma, Athmilm B"ilding Policy from 561/0 to 405/4 I.e. (Groningen, 1970); Camp, Agora J. M. Camp, The Athenian Agora (London, 1986); Judeich, Athen = W. Judeich, Topographie IlO1l Athen. tlandbuch der Altertumswissenschaft m.2.2 (2 nd ed., Munich, 193 1); Kolb, Agora = F. Kolb, AgOra Nnd Theater, Volks- fInd Pestv.,stmlmlNng (Berlin, 1981); Kolb, "Peisistratiden" F. Kolb , "Die Bau-, Kuhur- und Religionspolitik der Peisistratiden," in Jahrblldl tks Datschen Archaologisehen Insti",ts 92 (1971) 99ff.; Thompson-Wycherley, Agora = H. A. Thompson and R. E. Wycherley, The Agora of Athens. The Athenian Agora XIV (Princeton, 1972); Travlos, PD J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Anc:ient Athens (Tiibingen and New York, 1971). For bibliographical references on individual monuments and buildings I mostly give only Travlos, PD, where earlier literature is listed; more reoendy, se the sumry in R. E. Wycherley, Th. StarNs of Athens (Princeton, 1978). Important is the following new edition with commentary of Pausanias' description of Atca: PaNS",w" GNw tUlia Grecia I: L'Anica, ed. D. Musti and L. Beschi (1982). Maps illustrating the topography of Athens .in the archaic age and Agora in the 4th =

=

=

=

century B.C. are at the end of this chapter.

2. For similar aiteria concerning a clasification of the functions of the city, U. &0, La stn4tla asu (Milan, 1968) Chapter C .

d.

also

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Urban and Architectural Forms

various gods that provide the city and its individual parts with a kind of religious topography and thereby contribute to an ideological interpretation; public buildings and squares that reflect power structures; monuments at central points that express the contents of the community'S collective self­ consciousness, keep its past alive, and help to shape the present norms of behavior. Through al these elements, the life of the community is meaningfully formed in rituals and public actions. This is the city as a symbol of life. These aspects of the city are the subject of sociological semiotics. Finally, the total structuring of social life, as it is reflected in architectural forms, can be approached by questions such as whether the citizens live in large or small families, in common or separated rooms; whether there are large or small differences in the way the aristocracy and the commoners, the rich and the poor live, and whether they live in mixed or separated neighbor­ hoods; what role meeting places play, whether one meets often and lives an active social life or leads a solitary existence with little communication; and if people meet, whether they do so at political, religious or entertainment events, whether in sanctuaries, in the agora, in the gymnasium and palaestra, in the theater or in the baths, and whether they meet in places that serve as catalysts for the whole community or only for single groups. These categories define the city as a structure; these aspects of the city are the subject of structural sociology. When focusing on these classifying criteria, the questions of whether, when, and how a setlement can be defined as a city become secondary.3 This is not to say that such a discussion would not produce enlightening insights, but it entails the danger of reducing the problem to the simple alternative between city and "non-city" and of ignoring the plurality and complexity of the phenomena involved. In the following analysis, which is but a first attempt, I will use the notion of city in neutral terms. It is my goal to sketch the basic structures of settlement forms in the context of, community life during the different periods of the history and development of Athens. Thus for my present purposes the classification as a "city" is of seco¢ary importance. T H E EMERGENCE OF T H E EARLY ARCHAI C CIT)": MON UM ENTS OF MYTH

In Athens as in other places, the basic precondition for the emergence of the polis was the destruction - or at least disappearance - of earlier compact power structures. The preceding form of city, in the Mycenaean civilization, was, like all other cities of that period, centrally organized and hierarchically focused on the king! In Max Weber's terms, we are dealing with a 3. For more information on this problem, concerning both Greek and Roman antiquity, se F. Kolb, Die Stadt i", Altertu", (Munich, 1984) 1 1 ff. 4. For Athens in the Mycenaean period, se I. Travlos, PoleodomilU exelixis ton Athenon (Athens, 1960) 20ff.; I. Thallon Hill, The Ancient City of Athens (London, 1953) 8ff.; Sp. Iakovidis, He mykmaike akropolis ton Athenon (Athens, 1 962); id., Late Hel/adic Citatkls .,

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"Fiirstenstadt" with a diferentiated economy of crafts and trade that was concentrated primarily around and on the king's palace. The palace, as the center from which power, religion, and politics emanated, was also the most important object of politics and administration. The acropolis where the palace was located was the only fortress; it was both a bastion of rule and power and a shelter for the community. The populace lived in the surrounding countryside, probably in loose settlements; some concentration is found in the southeast in the area of the later Olympieion, which fits the information given by Thucydides on the location of old Athens before the time of Theseus.s Those settlements probably had no close connection among one another; unity was established through the common orientation toward the palace. At various sites in the area covered by the later city, religious life is attested through cults that must date back to Mycenaean times. Two types of cults are characteristic: on the one hand, the old natural landmarks in the area of the Olympieion that were sacred to Ge Olympia, Kronos and Rhea, Zeus and Eileithyia;' on the other hand, the cults of the necropolis in the area of the agora that, acording to their particular characteristics, were located at the fringes of the residential area.7 Both these groups of sacred places clearly reveal their subordination to the center, that is, the palace. There probably was neither opportunity nor space for a "public" life which would have brought together the people independently of their ruler. The image of the city densely clustered beneath the king's fortress must have clearly impressed upon everybody the hierarchical nature of their relationships. Although Athens seems to have escaped capture and destruction, here as in other places the end of the Mycenaean period around 1200 B.C. marked the end of the traditional rule of kings and of a culture focused on the palace. The subsequent centuries, in which the archaic polis emerged, are characterized by an increase in population paralleled by a decrease of central power. There is no doubt that Athens at that time, in accordance with Weber's categories, changed economically from a type of "Fiirstenstadt" to that of a "Marktstadt" whose inhabitants bought what they needed and earned their living in a market system independent of the ruler. The changes of this period undoubt­ edly oced in a process of many small steps over a long period of time. It is not possible to fix individual stages of this development chronologically; the on

Mainland GruCil (Leiden, 1 983) 73ff.; S. Immerwahr, The Athenian Agora XIII: The Neolithic and Bronze Ages (Princeton, 1971) 147ff. On the relationship between Athens and

other places in Attica in the Mycenaean period, se S. Diamant, "Theseus and the Unification of Attica," in Studies E. Vanderpool, Hesperia Suppl. 19 (Princeton, 1982) 41H. Generally on the wanax-ideology and palace culture, se K. Kilian, "The Emergence of wanax Ideology in the Mycenaean Palaces," Oxford J. of Archeol. 7 (1988) 291ff. (citing earlier Iiu:rature). S. Thuc. 2.15. Travlos, PD 289ff. (listing earlier literature). As described by Pausanias 1 .18.5 and 7. For attempts at localizing these cults, se 6. R. E. Wycherley, "Pausanias at Athens, II: A Commentary on Bok I, Chapters 18-19," Greek, R0m4n, and Byzant. St. 4 (1963) 1 57ff.; id., Stones ofAthens (n. 1) 164ff.; Travlos, PD 290, 325. 7. The sanctuary of Dionysos Lenaios (with esehara and black poplar), Leokoreion, and others: se Kolb, Agora 29ff.

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phenomena can only be blended together into a model that can serve as an "ideal type." Yet the characteristic shape of the new political and urban structures most likely was developed relatively late, that is, in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.8 On the one side, first the power of the rulers was strongly reduced until finally they were replaced by a plurality of magistrates whose term of office was restricted, eventually to one year. On the other side, the city developed new political strength. Beginning already in the eleventh century, an increase in population, due perhaps to an influx of foreigners, and the need for new setement space become apparent in the spreading of dwellings across the area of the later agora and in the establishment of a new necropolis farther out at the Eridanos river. In general, people seem to have lived in loose and scattered groups of settlements in the wider vicinity of the acropolis.' Probably in the eighth century, all of Attica was united in a process that as synoikismos received a quasi-mythical interpretation.10 Athens became the capital of a ter­ ritorial state which, except for Sparta, was larger than any other Greek polis. In that period the city was probably fortified by a new wall, which, although not comparable with the enormous Mycenaean fortifications on the acropolis, enclosed a much larger area.ll The economic and cultural prosperity is mir­ rored in the highly sophisticated and widely influential pottery production. The self-confidence of the leading aristocracy expressed itself in the most luxurious sepulcral monuments typical of that time. What were the conse­ quences of all this for the appearance of the city? The weakened kingship could not hold its position on the acropolis. The palace must have been given up; some sub-Mycenaean tombs might indicate a short period of settlement, but after that for two centuries the citadel yields no finds;12 only the cult of the palace goddess seems to have been continued in one form or another (see below). This change is reflected in myth as well: while the old kings, following the example of Erechtheus, are supposed to have lived on the acropolis, Aegeus' house is said to have been below near the Olympieion, in the area close to the llissos river, which formed the heart of the earliest urban settlement.13 This location, which ciimot have been funda­ mentaly diferent from that of the residences of the aristocratic families, is For an interesting, though in many respects hypothetical attempt at reconstruction,

8.

se I. Morris, Burial and AncU!nt Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge, 1987),

esp. 17t H. 9. Thompson-Wycherley, Agora 9, 1 6f. Cf. the plan of Athens' necropoleis in the 9th to 8th centuries in A. Snodgras, Archllic Greece: The Age of ExperimDft (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980) 29 fig. 5. 1 0 . On Theseus' syneocism, se Diamant (n. 4 ) 38H.; Snodgras (n. 9 ) 34f. 1 1 . Cf. E. Vanderpol, "1be Date of the Pre-Persian City Wall of Athens," in Phoros: TribNte to B. D. Meri" (Locust Valley, New York, 1974) 156H. (tennus post quem non: second quarter of the sixth century); H. Lauter and H. Lauter-Bufe, "Die vorthemistokleische Stadtmauer Athens nach philologischen und archiologischen Quellen," ArchiJologischer APlUiger (1975) 1 H ; F. E. Winter, "Sepultura intra urbem and the Pre-Persian Walls of Athens," in StJ4dies Vanderpool (n. 4) 199H. 12. Inunerwahr (n. 4) 154. .

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symptomatic of the king's position as a primus inter pares, as it can be dis­ cerned in the Homeric epics. The value of such mythical traditions might appear questionable but a similar development can be observed in Eleusis: around the middle of the eighth century, the old Mycenaean seat of the sovereign, in an elevated location, was transformed into a temple; since then, the family of the ruler and priest lived at the bottom of the hill.14 The shift from the life-long rule of a king - no matter how weakened his position was - to the colleges of magistrates with shorter tenure must have stimulated the formation of new centers. As a result - at least in the long run - the identity, typical of the monarchy, of personal residence and seat of office or government could not be maintained. The establishment of permanent seats of office doubtless enforced the awareness of, and the confi­ dence in, impersonal institutions and also quickly provided them with a strong sense of tradition. At the same time, clear consequences concerning spatial arrangements were drawn from the distribution of royal power among diferent officials: each received his own seat. We know of a Prytaneion, the seat of the Archon Eponymos, which must have had a particularly centralizing effect on the new polis community because it was the place of the municipal hearth; we also know that the Archon Basileus, the Archon Polemarchos, the Thesmothetai as well as the Phylobasileis had their own buildings. IS New dis­ coveries indicate that the Prytaneion must have been situated east of the acropolis,16 outside the old center (around the Olympieion) which probably expanded northwards at that time; the other officials' buildings most likely were in the same general area without, however, forming an architectural and spatial unity. Thus the magistrates' powers were not even cumulated topo­ graphically. Such division of political power meant, however, that in early archaic times the city did not have a strong political center. This corresponds to the site of the agora. The location of the place where people met before the later agora was established canot be identified archaeologicaly, and can be deduced from the evidence of written sources only with- great uncertainty P Yet all at­ tempts to locate an early agora in the "old city" in the southeast or near the magistrates' buildings are pure speculations without any support in the texts

13. Plutarch, TheseJU 12; Travlos, PD 83. 14. J. Travlos, "Athens and Fleusis in the 8th and 7th Century B.C.," Armuario della Scuola Archeologica di Alene 61 (1983) 323ff.; id., Bildlexiir.on :t:Mf' Topographie des aratiir.en Attilr.a (Tiibingen, 1988) 91f. 15. Judeich, Athen 297ff. (with sources) . On the location of the Prytaneion and the buildings, se S. G. Miller, The Prytaraeion (Berkeley, 1978) 38ff. On the other early significance of the communal fire and hearth and of Hestia for family and state, se J.-P. Vernant, Mythe el pensle chez I4.s G,ecs (3rd ed., Paris, 1985) 1 53ff. On the Boukoleion (of the Archon Basileus) se S. G. Miller, "Old Discoveries from Old Athens," Hesperia 39 (1970) 227ff. 16. G. Dontas, "The True AgIaurion," Ht!$fJeri 52 (1983) 48ff., whose conclusions confirm the location suggested by Miller (n. 15). 17. The only source on the "old agora" is Apollodorus in Harpokration s.v. Pandemos Aphrodite, FG,Hist 224 FI13.

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or archaeological evidence.IS On the contrary, the site of the meeting place must have been precisely in the opposite direction, away from the heart of the settlement: according to an uncertain source, it was immediately west of the acropolis near the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos;I' possibly it was even further to the northwest, in the area where the agora is attested from the sixth century.20 The square served numerous purposes: people met for religious celebrations, for political assemblies, perhaps also to muster the army. Politics did not yet dominate, and the agora on its peripheral site was not yet an obvious center of the community's life. The fact that there was no strong replacement for the palace after the Mycenaean period must have created a vacuum that is hard to imagine. In the times of cultural depression from the eleventh to the ninth century, the lack of a center of communication corresponded to the economic and social reality. Beginning in the eighth century, however, the growth in population, increasing economic prosperity, and the unification of Attica must not only have brought about new tasks for government and administration, but also stimulated new forms of cultural interaction among the citizens. In this situation it is understandable - actually, difficult to imagine otherwise - that the search for new focal points of communal life centered on religion and the sanctuaries. Everywhere in Greece, panhellenic as well as local shrines experienced an enormous rise in popularity as centers not only of religious but also of economic, political, and social life.21 In Athens, as the most obvious symbol of this development, the acropolis was transformed into a citadel of the gods and isolated from the residential areas;l the same pattern can be observed in that period in other places, too, even on the Capitol in Rome.23 While previously the old palace goddess had been worshipped in the Icing's domestic sanctuary, in Homer the mythical hero Erechtheus has be­ come a fellow ocpant of the temple of Athena.24 The political power that had collapsed was replaced - in a concrete topographical sense - by religious power. As a consequence, the gods assumed the role of providing the weak1 8 . Above all, the attempt of A. N. Oikonomides (The Two Ag�ras ;n Ancient Athens [Chicago, 1964]) to locate the old agora south of the acropolis must be considered a failure. 19. This is the location that is traditionally asumed; se for example, R. Martin,

Recherches 514r l'agora grecque (Paris, 1951) 255ff.; id., L'urbanisme 'dans la Grece antique (2nd ed., Paris, 1974) 294; R. E. Wycherley, "Archaic Agora," Phoenix 20 (1966) 285ff.; Thompson-Wycherley, Agora 19; Travlos, PD lE.; J. N. Coldstream, GeonuJt,;c Greece (New York, 1977) 315. 20. P. Siewert, review of Thompson-Wycherley, Agora, in Gnomon 49 (1977) 392 n. 58; Kolb, Agora 20ff. 2 1 . Snodgras, Archaic Greece (n. 9) 49ff. 22. The chronology of this proces is unclear. According to the archaeological finds, Mycenaean habitation on the acropolis ended in the twelhh century; after that, the earliest

datable testimonia of new life come &om the ninth century, apparendy from a sanctuary: B. Graef and E. LangiolZ, 1M antiken Vasm lion tier Alcropolis %I Athen I (Berlin, 1925) 4ff., 23ff.; J. N. Coldstream, Greelc Geometric Pottery (London, 1968) 1 3, 55, 399. 23. Being an acropolis, the Capitol in Rome was not included in the four regions of Servius Tulius, which only oovered the inhabited areas of the city: Livy 1 .43.13. 24. Iliad 2.546ff.; a slighdy different version in Odyssey 7.78ff.

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ened kingship and the short-term magistracies that succeeded it with much­ needed legitimacy. At the same time, many other sanctuaries must have become focal points of communal life. The center of gravity of the emerging polis at first remained in the south and southeast, toward the llissos river - where, apart from "Aegeus' house," many old cult sites are known to have existed - but the city must soon have expanded toward the north and northwest, with new sanctuaries and rich necropoleis.Is In the course of time, these sanctuaries in­ creasingly' became important meeting places, where the citizens developed new forms of religious and social communion. Initially, the citizens must have experienced their common identity primarily as a religious community. In this context, it was decisive that, for the first time, the appearance of the city came to express a collective memory. Everybody remembered the "Mycenaean" period as a great past. This memory was tied, on the one hand, to the colossal architecture of past ages, such as the "Pelasgian" fortress walls that could not be equalled by the present; on the other hand, perhaps even more importantly, this memory focused on the sanctuaries which not only served the need of worshipping timeless divine powers but often pointed at events and situations of the mythical past. Thus, for example, the temple of Athena on the acropolis had once been Erechtheus' palace; the sanctuary of Aglauros occupied the site where she had thrown herself off a cliff after opening the basket that contained little Erichthonios; the cleft near the Olympieion was the opening through which the last remains of the great flood had drained after Deucalion had been saved; and the temple of Apollo Delphinios had just been erected up to the roof by Aegeus when Theseus arrived in Athens.26 It does not matter how much "historical" memory and how much creative "reconstruction" has been preserved in these myths. Rather, what is most crucial is the new consciousness with which the life of the city was shaped: in this way the city received a mythical topograppy which made the dimension of the past accessible. The structure of this past is no continuous "history" that step by step led from the beginnings to the present; rather, it is the great time of origins, a mythical founding period which is separated from the present by long and quasi-empty centuriesP Cults, sanctuaries and "monu­ ments" serve as cariers of this mythical memory. The present moves within 25. The site of the Prytaneion provides an indication: se above, at n. 16. 26. Temple of Athena and palace of Erechtheus: see n. 24. Sanctuary of Aglauros: n. 16. Cleft at the Olympieion: Judeich, Athen 385. Temple of Apollo Delphinios: ibid. 387; Travlos, PD 83ff. 27. On this, se Holscher, "Tradition und Geschichte. Zwei Typen der Vergangenheit am Beispiel der griechischen Kunst," in J. Assmann and T. Holscher (eds.), Kultur und Gedihtnis (Frankfurt am Main, 1988) 1 15ff.; K. Raaflaub, "Athenische Geschichte und miindliche Oberlieferung," in J. von Ungem-Sternberg and H. Reinau (eds.), Vergangmheit in mundUcher Vberlieferung. Colloquium Rauricum I (Stuttgart, 1988) 197ff., esp. 208-2 1 1 (see also other contributions to this volume, esp. that of J. von Ungem-Sternberg on the early Roman tradition, 237ff.).

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this framework, which is totally shaped by the mythical past but filled by contemporary religious rituals. This mythical-religious horizon of life, how­ ever, must have been of great importance for shaping the identity of the polis, as it was not a general past of humankind, or even of all the Greeks, that was created here, but a specific past of an individual city. Thus through these sanctuaries and rituals the polis gave itself an individual profile. Beyond that, however, the existence of such "monuments" is in itself a highly significant historical phenomenon. The community of citizens puts up "signs" which it uses to establish and express its identity. Such signs attest to a state of communal development, in which the community exceeds the simple execution of concrete ways of living by achieving an active awareness of the meaning and structure of communal life. It is certainly not appropriate to conect a new definition of "city" with this development, but there can be no doubt that such transformation of the city into a semantic structure repre­ sents a decisive step toward more complex forms of life and settlement. THE ARCHAI C CITY: MON U M E N TS OF NOMOS

It took a long time and required a fundamentaly new impulse for the slowly growing and changing settlement to be structured as a whole. This was achieved only in the fuly developed aristocratic order of the sixth century B.C. Various circumstances must generaly have led to a more conscious shaping of the environment: through trade and colonization people were familiarized with the possibilities of urban planing in the highly developed civilizations of the East; at the same time they became more aware of their own particular ways of life. Moreover, trade extended the financial possibilities, which in tum made it possible to realize new concepts. Finally, the social and political crisis of the seventh and sixth centuries, which brought forth sages and lawgivers as well as ambitious tyrants, must generally have sharpened the idea of public order. In the history of the city of Athens, the periods of Solon and of the Pisistratids belong together; in this respect as wel� tyranny proves to be a special form of aristocracy. Being an old and "organically grown" city, Athens canot, however, document all the possibilities of archaic city planning. Cities are to a high degree bound to their past. Free planng according to the new principles of the archaic age was only possible in the newly founded colonies.28 There the ability to organize urban space rationally expressed itself in orthogonal street systems. But in some cases, even in older, grown cities, the same tendencies brought about considerable changes in urban structures, particularly concern­ ing public buildings. Athens probably was not the earliest example of this

28. Se, in general, F. Castagnoli, Orthogonal Town Plamring in Antiquity (Cambridge, Massachuset, 1971 ); E. Greco and M. Toreli, Stona thll'l4rbtmistica I: II ",ondo gr«:o (Rome, 1983) 149ff.

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process, but the changes occurring there are especially marked and more easily understandable in their historical context than anywhere else. The archaeological evidence surviving from that time does not allow us to observe the conditions of life or the social differentiation of individual houses and of larger districts in Athens. In general, the differences in dwelling forms must have increased: the richer houses probably often possessed dining rooms, a luxury poor people did not enjoy.'" At best, it might be possible to distinguish a social classification in the district of the Kerameikos with its concentration of craftsmen. A series of new public construction projects, including an extensive water pipeline with many well houses in different parts of the city, served the needs of the whole popuiation;30 on the acropolis, votive offerings were dedicated not only by the aristocracy but also by members of the working class.31 This was the time when the aristocracy built its sports grounds outside the city, which are the scene of many late archaic vase paintings: at least the academy, maybe the Lykeion as well, seems to have been established by the tyrants already in the sixth century.31 Thus the living spaces of the social classes must partially have become separated. On the whole, this development introduced into the layout of the city of Athens a strong element of structure and monumentality. Most important was the decision to move the agora into the center of communal life.33 For centuries, the flat zone northwest of the acropolis had been the site of graves and chthonic sanctuaries, and more recently of increasing numbers of houses and poters' workshops; if it served, in addition, as a meeting place for the assembly, it did so only in the midst of this conglomerate of diverse spheres of life. But after around 600 B.C. no more houses, graves or wells were built in a fairly large area between three important streets; the space was levelled, and a couple of wells were refilled. Up to the middle of the sixth century, the open space was extended, particularly toward the east. This can only have been achieved through considerable expropriation of privately owned land, partly at the expense, and perhaps against the will, of influential families. Thus indeed, this was a measure that reflects not only forceful urban planning but 29. On the general development of the Grek house in the archaic period, se H. Drerup, "Prostashaus und Pastashaus," MarbNrger Winclulmannsprogramm (1967) 6ff.; C. Krause, "Grundformen des Griechischen Palasthauses," ArchiJol. AfIZ. (1977) 164ff. 30. Cf. J. M. Camp . The Water SllPply of Ancient Athens from 3000 to 86 B. e. (Princeton, 1977) 62ff.; R. Tolle-Kastenbein, "Kallirrhoe und Enneakrunos,"Jahrb. des Deutschen ArchiJol. Irut 101 (1986) 55f£. 31. A. E. Raubitschek, DedicAtions from the Athtmil Acropolis (Cambridge, 1949) 464f. 32. Se J. Delorme, Gymnasia" (Paris, 1960) 36££. Confirmation is found in the rapid increase of palaestra scenes on late archaic vases; for a preliminary study, se A. Bruckner, PalitTailarstellungen auf frNhrotfigurigen attischen Vasen (Basel, 1954). 33. R. Martin, R«herches (n. 19) 261££.; Boersma, Building Policy 15ff.; Thompson­ Wycherley, Agora 19££.; Kolb, "Peisistratiden" 1 06ff.; T. L. Shear, Jr., "Tyrants and Buildings in Archaic Athens," in Athens Comes of Age: From Solem to Salamis (Princeton, 1978) 4ff.; Camp, Agora 37ff.; Th. Lorenz, in Perspelctiven tI Phi/osophie. Neues JahrbNch 13 (1 987) 395f.; H. von Steuben, "Die Agora des K1eisthenes - Zeugnis eines radikaIen Wandels?" in W. Schuller, W. Hoepfner and E.L Schwandner (eds.) , Demolcratie 14M Architelctur (Munich, 1989) 81-87. .

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also the precedence of central institutions over particular interests. The inten­ tion obviously was to give an unrestricted place of public character both to the assembly and to the trade that was increasing rapidly. Equally, it must have been the result of conscious planning that other political institutions were concentrated there. The first public building seems to have been erected in the second quarter of the sixth century at the site of the later Bouleuterion (although it remains unlikely that this was the meeting house of the archaic boule}.14 Soon thereafter, a building was added to the south that has the characteristics of a representative house with a central court and two porticos. Its interpretation as the palace of the Pisistratids, though uncertain, is supported by the similar location and structure of the Regia at the forum in Rome, which was a relic of the old royal palace.35 Further to the north, the Stoa Basileios, that is, a seat of office of the Archon Basileus, has been identified beyond any doubt; in this case, however, chro­ nology is stil controversial, the proposed dates ranging from the middle of the sixth century to after 480 B.C.36 If the early date were true, this would be highly significant for the character of the archaic agora. One has to keep in mind that this most traditional of all Athenian offices since the earliest times had its building, the Boukoleion, in the diametrically opposite part of Athens. Usually such official buildings remain firmly established at their old sites, and in this particular case the traditional Boukoleion continued to be used for some ancient religious purposes. Taking al this into account, one can imagine the amount of conscious planning that was necessary to achieve the construc­ tion of a new building for this official at the agora. The new cOncept of the agora as the heart of communal life was reinforced by the establishment of new cults that corresponded to that concept. An archaic sanctuary, which must have already been dedicated to Zeus, is situated underneath the later Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios.37 Next to it is the temple of Apollo Patroos, that is, the god of the archaic aristocratic family groupS.38 The old religious stratum of the necropolis with its cults of chthonic gods- and 34. Thompson Wycherley, Agora 25ff. The archaic boule probably met not here, as has often been asumed, but on the areopagus: Judeich, Athm 299f. Or else, one might think of the Thesmotheteion where Solon brought together the archons who had so far used separated buildings: Aristode, Ath. Pol. 3.5. 35. Thompson-Wycherley, Agora 27f. Interpretation as palace of the tyrants: Boersma, Building Policy 1 6f., with support by Camp, Agora 44f. Kolb, "Peisistratiden" 104££., follows the traditional opinion in placing the mansion of the Pisistratids on the acropolis. For a comparison with the Regia in Rome, se C. Arnpolo, "Ana1ogie e rapporti Era Atene e Roma arcaica. Osservazioni sulla Regia, sui Rex Sacrorum e sui Culto di Vesta," La parola tiel pasato 26 (1971 ) 443££., who, however, interprets the Athenian building as the Prytaneion, which is hardly tenable. 36. T. L. Shear, "The Athenian Agora. Excavations of 1970," Hesperia 40 (1971) 243ff.; id., "The Athenian Agora. Excavations of 1973-1974," ibid. 44 (1975) 365ff.; Thompson­ Wycherley, Agora 83ff.; Kolb, "Peisistratiden" 1 07f.; G. Kuhn, "Untersuchungen zur Funktion der Siulenhalle in archaischer und klassischer Zeit," Jahrb. des Deutsch. Archaol. Inst. 100 (1985) 200ff.; Camp, Agora 53ff., 100f.; von Steuben (n. 33) 82f. 37. Thompson-Wycherley, Agora 96. 38. Thompson-Wycherley, Agora 136£.; Camp, Agora 161.

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heroes thus was overlaid by a newer stratum of state religion. In those sanctu­ aries the city consciously articulated its character as a political organism and celebrated it in public cults. The central position of the agora is most strongly symbolized by the Altar of the Twelve Gods built by the tyrant's son, Pisistratus the Younger, in 522121 B.C.39 The fact that all Olympian gods were thus united in one place attests to the highest possible religious concentration. The distances to all villages in Attica were measured from this spot; the erection of the famous Herms halfway between Athens and the other settlements in the country - a measure introduced by the tyrant's brother, Hipparchus, as a deliberate step toward political centralization - did not refer to the acropolis but to this altar on the agora.40 It is generally characteristic of this period that the agora in its function as the public center remained open toward the surrounding city. Deep into the classical period, craftsmen and traders continued to push forward almost uncontrollably into the periphery of the square.41 All aspects of the city's life could be integrated there. At the same time, it is typical of the early period of Athens that the central sanctuary and the agora were separated. It is not just the specific history of Athens with its "Mycenaean" acropolis that provides an explanation of this bipolarity of the religious and forensic centers, for the same phenomenon appears in the newly founded cities of the archaic period (see below). Only much later, when politics increasingly became an autono­ mous and self