1 Cities and Communes
Communal Italy generally refers to the urbanized areas in Lombardy and Tuscany during this time. Self-governing communes emerged around 1080-1120. But by 1200, these communes were struggling to accommodate the aspirations of the popolo, groups excluded to that time by the established regimes. By 1300, the problems had gotten so bad that signori, single families, were often in charge.
The communes drew on notions from the late days of the old Roman times. They arose as the larger states collapsed or were simply in absentia. By 1000, the German overlords were often not present to impose authority. Bishops often acted as de facto authorities. The Italian kingdom had ceased to function in any meaningful sense, and the cities were left dependent on themselves. The bishops themselves were undermined by this, but the real change happened with the reform movements that saw a desire that the church would turn from worldy affairs.
This didn’t happen overnight, it was a slow transition, but by 1150, communes had been established in all the major towns and cities of Lombardy and Tuscany. They set up assemblies, elected officials, sought to unify territories surrounding the town centers, and kept legal materials. The relatively close proximity helped to spread the ideas from one to the next.
The unweildiness of the large assemblies as the cities grew made smaller councils more effective. There was also a fairly large bureaucracy involved. By the end of the 12th century, many of the communes had sought a podestà– a supreme official with enough responsibility to get things done. The podestà was originally a short-term office, but in short order, powerful families were fighting each other for control. Many of the podestà were therefore brought from other cities, to avoid factional favoritism. But increasingly, there was a hostile environment and military duty was an important factor of the leadership.
Since the cities were the centers of what was happening, that was where the elites went to exercise power and be seen. They were building huge towers in order to broadcast their wealth and power.
But against this set of elites, a new class of merchants that had been excluded from authority was rising up. They formed guilds in order to exercise enough political power. These societas popoli, or the popolo, achieved a measure of power by the mid 1200’s. They sought to break the hold of the nobles on office holding by introducing their own candidates. They also sought more equitable taxation, and thirdly, they wanted to restore law and order, by curbing the disturbances of competing wealthy families.
By the 1300’s the power of the old families had been damaged and new families were rising to prominence. These signori sometimes rose to power through coups, but they often worked their way up through the system. Some of them stayed for longer times and through time the position became life-long. As this happened, there was little defense of the commune- the people, as they had back when Rome changed from Republic to Empire, wanted a strong man who could deliver strong rule in a crisis.
2 Law and Monarchy in the South
Medieval southern Italy and Sicily were the gateways through which western Europe received Byzantine and Arabic art, architecture, and scholarship. Translations of important works from Greek and Arabic into Latin took place here.
Southern Italy shouldn’t be treated as a frontier of Europe or a part of the Italian entity. Much of its history is a reflection of power relationships in a larger context, and it can’t be understood without putting it in the context of the history of the Mediterranean. Given that the cities of southern Italy were coastal, and separated by mountain ranges, their connection was by the sea. In the middle ages, southern Italy were more a part of the Mediterranean than continental Europe.
Norman unification
From the 7th century, the Mediterranean consisted of three broad cultural regions: Latin Christian western Europe, Greek Christian Byzantine east, and Arab-Islamic north Africa and Spain. Southern Italy was on the borders. In the 11th century when Norman warriors arrived, Calabria was under control of the Byzantine empire. Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta were subject to Byzantium; Salerno, Capua and Benevento were effectively independent Lombards, and Sicily was muslim. The Normans originally were Byzantine mercenaries, but began taking territory in the area. Richard and Robert Guiscard were the first to conquer territory in Sicily and south Italy. After conquering the areas, the Normans were rulers, but a small minority. Politically though, their rule transformed the regions from Meditarranean, to a part of Latin-Christian Europe. When they first conquered, the majority of Sicilians were muslims and Greeks. But their rule brought large-scale migration of Lombards to Italy, which transformed even the language to a latin dialect.
Roger II took over in 1127, and quickly transformed Sicily and south Italy into a major kingdom, by uniting the territories under his strong rule. There were different cultural areas within the territory: western and southern Sicily were mostly muslim. North and eastern Sicily was largely Greek. After the pacification of the territory, he managed to unify the area politically, while still allowing different cultural backgrounds. He was willing to allow existing laws as long as his edicts had priority.
The center of the kingdom was Palermo and its Norman kings. By his death in 1154, Roger II had gained control of the important commercial routes in the central Mediterranean. He had treaties with Genoa and Venice, and peace with Germany. He had peaceful relationships with the Byzantine empire and even England.
After William II died in 1189, his aunt Constance was the legitimate heir of Sicily. She married Henry VI of Germany. This left a period of upheaval for a while. But Henry eventually gave birth to Frederick II, marking the change from the Norman Hauteville house, to the Hohenstaufen German house. When Henry died in 1197, and Constance in 1198, Frederick II was made king… but he was only 3 at the time.
In 1208, when he came of age (14), he undertook the restoration of the kingdom. But he was also declared king of Germany in 1211, so he had to go there to manage affairs for some years. He didn’t come back to Sicily until 1220. When he did return, he wasn’t just king of Sicily, he was also king of Germany. Nonetheless, he loved Sicily and wanted to stay there. So he set about putting affairs in order. He had been commissioned to go on a crusade, but needing to put his affairs in order in Germany, he put it off. This pissed off the Pope, who excommunicated him. Nonetheless, he left for Jerusalem in 1228. He took a wife who was heiress to Jerusalem, which made him king. He managed a negotiation with al-Kamil and celebrated a diplomatic victory in 1229. This bloodless success apparently didn’t sit well with the Pope, who invaded Sicily: a papal holy war waged against a crusader! Frederick came back to Sicily, kicked out the papal army and made a peace with the humiliated pope in 1230.
But as much as Frederick wanted to return Sicily to the golden days of its past, the conditions inside Sicily and south Italy had changed. The demographics had changed. The coexistence of Muslims and Christians came to an end, and muslim agricultural skills were deported. Palermo was no longer the center of the kingdom either. Frederick’s position as king of Germany also meant that he had to mind the politics to the north as well. When he died in 1250, the kingdom was too large to be unified in any meaningful way. He appointed his son to rule, but things didn’t get any better.
Charles of Anjou
The papacy wanted a different ruler than the Hohenstaufens and anointed Charles of Anjou in 1266. He made an energetic effort to restore order and the kingdom. The basic structure stayed the same as before, but regardless, the situation had changed. As French settlers began to arrive on Sicily, they became the new ruling class, which caused friction between the old and the new. Sicilians became a province and lost their central status. Charles also ruled over a large empire and couldn’t focus much on Sicily.
The Sicilian Vespers
In 1282, a quarrel between a palermitan and a French soldier escalated to a revolt with a bunch of French soldiers killed. The islanders sought protection from the Pope, but he refused and excommunicated the entire island. They decided to turn to Peter III of Aragon. So he landed in Trapani and was declared king.
This was the break of the kingdom though and Sicily would be a separate entity from southern Italy.
4 The Rise of the Signori
The communes of the 13th century recreated the institutions and methods of ancient democracy and anticipated the achievements of modern states in defining and achieving secular goals. Political participation was widened beyond a narrow elite, whose influence was restricted through devices such as secret balloting, short terms of office, and limits on repeat office-holding. The communes produced constitutions, strong administration, and a permanent bureaucracy. But democracy did not bring peace, and the power of division and faction grew stronger.
One of the shortcomings of communal government is the lack of resources. In practice, it relies on communal support and private initiative across a range of public business. But frequent rotation of government and administrative personnel brings confusion rather than participation and impartiality. Citizens avoided public duty rather than participate in it, and attacked government rather than obeying public agents.
The pretenses of communal government were made impossible by four powerful forces:
Class and wealth sought, and won, privilege and preferential treatment at the hands of government in areas such as justice, taxation, and military obligation;
Client/Patron relationships turned state offices to private gain;
Family clans provided a rival focus of loyalty and sought to displace the state itself;
Feudal lordships, seigneuries, of castles lands, dependent tenants and jurisdiction persisted across northern Italy and used the cities penchant for warfare to strengthen their positions in city and country.
The response to this failure was political change, and from the middle of the 1200’s, a new breed of political and military leaders, signori, began to dominate.
5 Trade and Navigation
The rise of the four maritime republics: Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi.
8 The Family
Italy during the time period was cohesive, but still diverse. Italian families existed long before 1100, but around that time, we begin to get more source material to work with. In the south, Byzantine and Muslim rule had ceased, but their teachings on the family remained important in Sicily and Calabria. The north/south divide was important too. Northern Italy was becoming one of the most urbanized areas of Europe, but even there, the contrasts between city and rural life were profound. The ancient Roman law of the family still endured. And the Mediterranean honor code was probably strongest in Italy. Honor and shame were deeply embedded in Italian culture, particularly with regards to ‘their women’.
In general, the Catholic church and its teachings on the family were the same for all of Europe. Marriage was by consent, divorce was wrong, monogamy the rule, incest was a sin and marriage was prohibited among close kin. Bonds to godmothers, godfathers, and godchildren were important in Italy.
The age of marriage for women was falling, with a floor set at 12. But in Italy, women tended to marry younger. Men were rarely married before 20, and there is evidence of growing age gaps through time. A complicating factor was the requisite dowry, which was a large factor in Italian homes.
The family was an economic unit was important as well, with size and opportunities for family members being dependent on familial wealth. Children in Italy, as elsewhere, were an investment that could guarantee the survival of the family.
The traditional teaching that the family purpose was to bring legitimate children to the world, provide companionship for husband and wife, and help partners avoid vice, were additional frameworks for Italian families.
One purpose of the family was to produce children to keep the family line alive. But this concept of the family meant that some children would be defined as illegitimate, which left them with few legal mechanisms to be included in the family.
A large number of wills gives us a glimpse of family life; many couples were childless, and many more were very small families. Grandparents were rare, meaning most families were two generations. 17% of the testators in Palermo before 1350 were not married, suggesting that not everyone sought marriage.
The law regulated family lives at times, even attempting to legislate personal moralities. In an interesting follow up to the old Lex Oppia, Frederick II (1296-1337) tried to improve morality among his subjects. One of his General Ordinances from 1310, required modest dress for women. The purpose seems to have been again, to reduce ostentatious displays of wealth and expense, which would foster modesty, and importantly, reduce family rivalries. Perhaps he felt the times merited such an approach, but the women bore all the brunt of the law’s rigor.
One of the momentous developments during this time was the rise of family names. By 1350, it was nearly universal, except in rural areas. First names were increasingly given after prominent saints, leading to a limit in the pool of names, and also a repetition.
9 Language and Culture
The first signs of a vernacular Italian are the Riddle of Verona and some graffiti in the catacombs of Comodilla in Rome, from around 800. Due to the paucity of textual evidence, we can infer that there wasn’t a fierce awareness of any difference between Latin and the vernacular.
The linguistic situation was diverse. The coastal areas, more in the south than north, maintained a Mediterranean orientation towards Greek. Sicily had a large Greek speaking population, and after the Muslim conquests in the ninth century, entire parts of Sicily were Arabic speaking. Arabic words also spread north along trade routes. In the north, the Kingdom of Italy was oriented towards the Holy Roman Empire beyond the Alps. In the center of the peninsula, there were pockets of Greek speakers, and south of Rome, a ‘Sabine’ form existed that dropped the –mb- and –nd- sounds (gamba became gamma; mondo became monno) that spread to all southern Italy.
The most linguistically conservative areas, which kept the final –s of Latin were found in the high Alpine valleys. The Appenine valleys saw innovations such as the softening of intervocalic consonants (acu > ago).
There is nothing to suggest the inhabitants of Italy thought they spoke any type of unified language, an “Italian”, if anything, the reverse is true. The lack of an adjective Italian doesn’t escape notice. The first conscious affirmation of unity among the spoken languages on the peninsula would be Dante’s definition as the ’lingua del sì’.
Between 1000-1300, Arabic fell to complete disuse. The crusades changed the relationship with the Muslim world and closed the door on lexical borrowing from Arabic. Immigration from the north also displaced the use of Greek in Sicily and the south.
Rome had no particular dialect at the time and it was Tuscan that helped create the modern Roman dialect.
10 The Italian Other
There is a question still over how much these other peoples: Greeks, Muslims, and Jews, genetically affected the population. Were the effects of the invasions and settlers superficial- in which case they left a relatively stable native population whose genes can be traced back to pre-medieval times? Or did the settlers mix genetically with the local Sicilian and southern Italian populations.
Greeks
There has been a substantial Greek population in Italy for a long time. Later Muslim settlers were added to the population. But as they went into decline, many found their way to Greek Christian churches. Not so much by conversion necessarily, but through a slow process of shifting allegiances from the mosque to the church as the obvious focus of social life and moral authority in the community.
The cultural life of Norman Sicily was heavily influenced by Greek models. Greek presence in the north was very limited. Even in Venice, which had long commercial ties with the Byzantine empire, there was no real substantial Greek population. Latins sought to establish themselves in Greek lands, but Greeks didn’t seek to establish themselves in Latin lands.
Muslims
The Muslim presence in Italy and Sicily was through invasion and conquest. Paradoxically, Muslim culture and splendor reached its zenith under Norman control. This is because prior to Norman control of Sicily, the real cultural centers were located outside Sicily; in either Tunisia or Egypt.
The Islamic world used Sicily as producers of products desired in the Islamic world: indigo, henna, and sugar. Under the Normans, these were ditched in favor of wheat. When the Normans took over, they offered freedom of religion in exchange for the Muslims’ acceptance of Christian rule. The aim was continuity and stability. They also adopted Muslim administrative practices.
But through time they were driven into ever tighter corners and eventually, their presence on the island was either driven off or absorbed.
Jews
The Jews in southern Italy and Sicily were stabilizing influences. Unlike in the north, where they were forced to the margins of society, in the south they were simply one of many distinctive groups.
The Jews themselves said their history began in the days of Titus, who had settled them in Taranto and surrounding areas.
Much is known of the Sicilian Jews, because we have much correspondence about their activities in trading with Cairo. But the arrival of the Normans undermined the Jewish merchants. The Normans however had no difficulty accepting the Jews as part of the local fabric of society. The Jews were generally Arabic speaking, so they could act as intermediaries between Christian and Muslim.
Within towns, Jews often sought control over animal slaughter, and they cultivated vines. Control over these allowed them to maintain a flow of Kosher products for Jewish consumption.
Frederick II’s reign marked a transition in their relationships. Jews were increasingly considered off-limits to Christians. From 1000-1300, Jews lived more in the south. But by the 1600’s, they had migrated to the north.
Rome itself had a continuous Jewish communal presence from antiquity.