Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125-1325
by Augustine Thompson, O.P.
Introduction
This is a book about the religious life of ordinary laypeople in high medieval
Italy. As such, it is an excursion into a mostly uncharted world, the lived
experience of orthodox religion in the Italian cities. Some readers might find
this characterization surprising, even shocking. Nothing could be better known
than what it meant to be “Catholic” Christians in the Italy of
Saint Francis and Dante. So historians of medieval religion have directed their
gaze and research elsewhere. During my first venture into the world of thirteenth-century
Italian religion, more than fifteen years ago, I was surprised to discover
how little the day-to-day orthodox world had been studied. Older scholarship
produced studies of papal politics and scholastic theology, but these treated
only an ecclesiastical elite. In his classic study of medieval religious movements,
Herbert Grundmann first suggested that high medieval heresy, the mendicants,
and women’s mysticism all formed part of a single whole and deserved
more attention. Subsequent scholarship focused, almost exclusively, on those
three phenomena. A glance at the treatment of medieval religion in the Einaudi
handbook of Italian history, itself the work of an eminent scholar, shows an
odd religious landscape. Traditional scholarly divisions rule: a section on
the Gregorian Reform is followed by sections dedicated to heresy and repression
(pp. 609–733), the mendicant orders (pp. 734–874), and the Church’s
institutional crises of the 1300s (pp. 874–974). Heretics, popes, theologians,
Franciscans, and saints. Where is everyone else?
Among Grundmann’s areas of interest, heretics were the first to generate a scholarly industry, already vital in the 1960s. The bibliography on heresy in medieval Italy is vast and ever expanding. There is also a growing recognition that heresy cannot be understood apart from the religion it rejected. In spite of their prominence in modern scholarship, heretics represented only a tiny fraction of the medieval Italian population. Since 1980 Grundmann’s interest in thirteenth-century mysticism has been transformed, in great part by the work of André Vauchez, into a rich and expanded field of study, that of saints and holiness. But again, as in the case of heretics, saints represented only a tiny fraction, albeit an important one, of those living in the medieval Italian cities. New studies on “popular religion” and “lay piety” initially appeared to be very promising. But the religious experience studied in these books tends to dissolve into a disembodied piety; day-to-day realities are lost in generalizations and abstraction. This book is a study of neither the “popular religion” nor the “lay piety” showcased in such books. It is, I hope, something greater, a recovery of the religious world of all in the Italian cities who considered themselves orthodox Christians. Medieval lay piety is incomprehensible without the sacraments and the clergy, but “popular religion” is seldom treated as part of the larger world of orthodox worship and belief. Perhaps its very “legality” and ordinariness make the garden variety of Christian life so elusive. The scarcity of sources and the opacity of those that exist cannot excuse the failure to pursue such a study, although they are often so used. Indeed, Vauchez has already pointed the way toward recovering the concrete, lived religion in Italy in spite of the lack of sources.
The communes were simultaneously religious and political entities. This may sound like a commonplace, but given the trajectories of modern scholarship, this perspective represents something of a reorientation. Historians of communal Italy once focused on the cities as a precursor for the centralized states of early modern Europe, and this political perspective still obscures the religious nature of communal Italy for many modern observers. Recently, historians of medieval Italy have gone beyond a story of political progress and emphasized instead the factiousness, primitiveness, oligarchy, particularism, and agrarian dependence of the cities, their “archaic” nature. All to the good. Yet in histories of the communes, religion remains oddly alien to the civic life. In Philip Jones’s recent 673-page study of the Italian city-states, the author dedicates a mere seventeen pages to their religious life—and these are mostly dedicated to conflicts over ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction. The best short overview of the communes available in English asserts: “The Italian communes . . . were essentially secular contrivances whose particularism flourished in spite of a universal religion and the claims of a universal empire.” No, I do not think so. What this opposition of clerical and lay realms obscures is that the city was a single entity, however jurisdiction and government were divided. And its lay government, far from being “secularized” by its separation from the cathedral and bishop, came to express and understand itself through ever more explicitly religious rhetoric and rituals. The communes were able to distance themselves from the medieval empire because they, like the empire, claimed a sacred legitimacy. It has been argued that the proximity of the papacy and wars with the popes forced the communes to develop this religious identity—to justify political policies independent of the papacy. But this flies in the face of the political policies and communal identity of the first Lombard League. Rather, it was the cities’ wars with the empire that encouraged their citizens to sacralize the commune. The cities exploited religious forms of organization, they sought legitimacy through the cult of patron saints, they conceptualized their time and space in sacred terms, and these religious realities in turn formed the people. The Italian city as a living religious entity deserves greater attention.
I should note from the onset that I have chosen to keep the Franciscans on the sidelines and so let the piety that produced Francis speak for itself. There is probably no period and place in Christian history where ordinary people had a greater impact on forms of devotion than in the communal republics of Italy. The world of the communes came between the rule of the count-bishops of the old empire and the later rule of the princes. The cities produced a religious culture truly their own. Communal Italy also produced the single largest concentration of lay saints in Christian history, the modern age included. This book is meant to be about the people who produced Saint Francis, not his imitators or those whom he influenced.
Scholars of ancient and early modern religion have already produced fine reconstructions of Christians and their lived piety—their rituals, their beliefs, and their devotions. These accomplishments challenge the way we Italian medievalists do our work. Such a study is long overdue for communal Italy. If my book has succeeded in recapturing this lost world, even in part, then good. If it has failed, then I hope it will convince others to renew the attempt.
Part I: Sacred Geography
The first part of this book presents a religious geography of the communes, the self-governing republics of Italy, during their classical period, 1125–1325. My geographical choice was not arbitrary, as will become clearer as the book goes on. Until books like this one appear for France, England, Germany, Spain, and the rest of Italy, sustained comparisons are impossible. But it is already clear that in many ways the religious life of the Italian communes was unique. Only in central and northern Italy did the public cult focus on a revival of the ancient practice of mass Easter baptisms conducted by the bishop. Elsewhere in Europe the dioceses were simply too large for such consolidation. Scholars working on southern Italy assure me that it did not occur there; indeed, south Italian cities were quite different in their ecclesiastical, commercial, and political forms. So, too, only in the region studied in this book did medieval cities construct great new monumental baptisteries for their Easter rites. This special focus of city religious life on the cathedral complex also distinguishes the religion of the large communes from the Italian countryside—where such consolidation was impossible.
Within north-central Italy, I focus principally on those cities that achieved practical autonomy during the twelfth-century struggles against German imperial rule. This means that I have little to say about Venice, so unique in many ways, or the cities in the States of the Church, with their unique relations to their nearby papal sovereign. At the risk of anachronism—for even today Italy is a land of fierce regionalism—I call, as a shorthand, the citizens of these cities “Italians.” Although they certainly thought of themselves first of all as Florentines or Bolognese, Milanese or Sienese, these communes had marked cultural and political similarity, and they themselves had already begun to use the adjective italiani to distinguish themselves from their would-be German overlords.
Chronological divisions, like those I have chosen, are always arbitrary, but mine provide a reasonable framework for the age of the republican city-states of Italy. In 1125, the emperor Henry V died; two hundred years later, only two of the northern communes, Padua and Parma, still enjoyed republican independence. In 1328, they too fell into the hands of seignorial families, the della Scala and the Rossi. Henry’s death signaled the decline of imperial power in the north and the establishment of independent governments, a process complete by 1140. Already before the fall of Padua and Parma, the age of princes had arrived and the republican era was gone. In Tuscany, as at Venice and Genoa, republican forms continued on, but these cities became oligarchies, having little in common with the popular communes of the 1200s. Ruling groups always employ public ceremony for their own purposes. The ritual world of late medieval Florence, so provocatively described by Richard Trexler, with its aristocratic flavor evocative of the Medici princes, feels quite different from that of the high medieval communes. I suspect that the rise of princes and oligarchies lies behind this change, although this is still a conjecture waiting for another book to confirm it.
The first five chapters of this book map the religious and civic “geography” of the city-states. The first sketches the republics’ ecclesiastical institutions and their relation to civic identity. The bishop, the cathedral, and the diocese predated the commune, and they outlived it. Historians have given much attention to the economic and political development of Italian bishoprics. We have much on church territory and jurisdiction, much on diocesan administration, but little on the people’s identification with the church of the city. I hope to go beyond these investigations and present bishops, cathedrals, clergy, and parish organization as the context for the religious world of the citizens. I am especially interested in the ways in which they provided the backdrop for the creation and development of the early communes, politically, culturally, and spiritually.
The rise of the communes presupposed the formation of voluntary associations, in particular the religious associations that grew up in the penance culture populated by the conversi—lay penitents, often married—who spontaneously took up a life of moderate asceticism while remaining in the world. Chapter 2 treats this movement and its forms. The chapter is founded on the well-known work of Fr. Giles Gérard Meersseman, adding new items from manuscript sources only occasionally. Conversi had already begun to coalesce into groups half a century before they received a “rule” in 1210. Their societies and confraternities provided a model for other voluntary associations, especially those that would form the corporations known as the Popolo (people) in the golden age of communal democracy.
The third chapter focuses on the popular commune itself and its religious self-understanding. The precocious democracy of the Italian communes is too well known to require much comment. Recently, scholars have reevaluated the ideology of the medieval republics and discovered a political theory of great sophistication, in comparison to which Renaissance “civic humanism” looks rather restricted and oligarchic. But even the most evocative appreciations of communal political theory obscure its Christian character. Ecclesiastical and civic institutions formed a single communal organism, and this chapter is meant as a complement, not a contrast, to my first chapter. Communal lay governments themselves magnified their “sacred” aspects, associating their cities with patron saints and, especially in the age of the Popolo, adopting wholesale religious language, rituals, and forms. Bishop and commune, clergy and laity, feuded occasionally, but they inhabited the same space and shared the same culture.
Chapter 4 evaluates how the cities used ritual to form and “imagine” themselves. Much has been done on ritual in late medieval Italy, but not in high medieval Italy. I hope this chapter will break some ground in that direction. Processions, candle offerings, and bell ringing dominated the ritual expressions of public life in the Italian republics. Such ceremonies claimed a public space for the city’s “natural” unit, the family, shaped the social ordering of neighborhoods, and finally gave identity to the city itself. Rituals made tangible the patterns and orderings of urban life. In them, the city spoke to itself about its composition, its sources of authority and power, and its boundaries.
Italian urban piety produced a peculiar kind of holiness. The final chapter of Part I focuses on the most distinctive spiritual characteristic of the communes, their lay saints. Medieval “sanctity” has also been the object of much historical and anthropological study in recent years. So, too, the urban context of medieval Italian saints is now getting the attention it deserves. Still, the towering figure of Saint Francis of Assisi—and his order—so dominate the landscape that we easily forget that he exemplified a common lay style of holiness. The holy men and women of the cities deserve a portrait in their own right because they represent the holiness venerated by their contemporaries. The saints are not a stand-in for ordinary lay piety. First, they were saints and, by that standard, exceptional. There is no question that a certain, more or less sizable, proportion of the lay population was not pious at all and perhaps even religiously indifferent. Second, with a couple of exceptions, the saints were very much influenced by traditional monastic asceticism and so distanced themselves from many aspects of ordinary life, such as children and marriage. The exceptions include Saint Facio of Cremona, Saint Pietro Pettinaio of Siena, and Saint Omobono of Cremona. Ascetic as they were, they did not become full-fledged penitents. The lay saints were above all good neighbors, exceptional principally in the intensity with which they lived the common religiosity. The women saints did not enter cloisters or join organized religious orders. The men practiced worldly professions or dedicated themselves to organized charity. Even hermits, like Saint Giovanni Buono of Mantua or Saint Galgano of Siena, never ceased to be part of the city landscape. Their neighbors responded to these remarkable individuals by “canonizing” them, that is, by praying to them after death and expecting miracles. Cities collaborated in the cults, erecting shrines and fostering devotion. Sometimes devotees called in the papacy to validate a saint, but this was neither necessary nor common. A network of local shrines imposed a kind of “charismatic” overlay on the religious geography of civic and ecclesiastical institutions. The saint, living at home or supernaturally present at his shrine, was a fixture of urban religious geography.
Part I of this book draws heavily on city and ecclesiastical statutes, tithe lists, court litigation, and hagiography. Studies on the significance of the names that Italians gave their children, like those on the relative popularity of civic patron saints, I have used whenever available, though mostly by default, since little other evidence exists for religious institutions and attitudes. The transition from legal and administrative texts to lived realities, and from hagiographic commonplaces to actual people, is fraught with pitfalls. Nonetheless, if particular saints did not perform the marvels ascribed to them, their biographers still had to assimilate the saints to conventional ways of holiness. And that is exactly our subject. Furthermore, when emphasizing the miraculous, biographers could not hide the very conventionality that recommended saints to the neighbors who canonized them. In legal texts, too, a society often speaks to itself about shared ideals and fears.
Part II: Religious Observance
Shared religion is shared behavior as well as space. Part II focuses on the shared behavior of communal Catholics, but it is not a study of “popular religion.” It is a study of communal—that is, urban—religion as experienced by all its practitioners, from the common people to the elites. The first three chapters of this section are liturgical history, understanding “liturgy” in its original Greek meaning as “the work of the people.” I focus more on the laity than the clergy, even though the rituals described are mostly the formal cult of the Church, the sacraments of the Mass, penance, and baptism. I have foregrounded, in all three chapters, the “nave” and backgrounded the “choir.” In church, movement, gesture, and sensation spoke more eloquently than words to the laity. Nevertheless, words did matter. The unlettered “got” and “took away” much more from the chanted Latin than we give them credit for. The liturgy of the cities, except for Milan, with its Ambrosian Rite, was that of the Roman Church in a north Italian form. I have privileged liturgical sources localized in that region. One witness has proved indispensable, Bishop Sicardo of Cremona, whose Mitrale is a trove of riches for Italian worship in the late 1100s. Next to him in importance are the canons of Siena, who produced a revision of their early-twelfth-century ordo about 1210. Equal in importance is the work of Rolando, a deacon of Pisa, who compiled his study of local Pisan usages in the late 1100s. For the lay perspective on the rituals described by these clerics, I have drawn on hagiography and narrative sources.
The first of the three liturgical chapters focuses on the Divine Office and the Mass. These, and especially the latter, formed the shared devotional patrimony of medieval Italians, as they did for Christians throughout Europe. The next two chapters follow the liturgical year, that catechetical tool of the medieval Church. First, I examine the period from Christmas to Lent, briefly glancing at the feasts of the saints. Lent, especially after 1215, was the time for confession, and in this context I examine that sacrament and the pious practices that surrounded it. It is not my intention to reproduce the massive scholarship treating penitential and confessional manuals in the period. Rather, I try to recover the people’s experience of going to confession and doing penance. The concentration of private confessions in Lent following Lateran IV and their linkage with public reconciliations had a transforming impact on the sacramental rite. The last liturgical chapter moves through Holy Week to Pentecost. Its centerpiece is the civic rite of the Easter vigil, with its mass baptism of infants, a ritual innovation distinctive of the communes. Baptism made the children citizens of both the commune and of heaven. At Easter the commune renewed itself and reaffirmed its identity as a sacred society. These rites came to be so closely associated with republican identity that they were among the first things to go as princes established seignorial rule in the early 1300s.
The ninth chapter focuses on the prayer life of ordinary people outside of the liturgical context. Taken with the earlier chapters on sacramental life, this completes my overview of orthodox religious practice and experience within the spiritual geography described in the first part of the book. Narrative sources paint a vivid picture of the “lay Psalter,” the practice of reciting a set number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys that would become the Rosary of the late Middle Ages and modern Catholicism. Manuscript collections of devotions and prayers dating as early as the 1200s suggest more bookish forms of piety. A final chapter focuses on death and the rituals that gave it meaning, linking the living to the faithful departed. Here I consider both the rituals of dying—making an edifying “good death”—and the web of relations and neighbors who assisted those dying and carried their bodies to the church and grave. Where they exist, I have drawn on published studies of Italian wills and testaments, especially for what these can tell us about deathbed charitable practices. Communal Italians reaffirmed the community even in death by the performance of suffrages, prayers for the dead. I close the book by acknowledging how this practice linked the people of the city here on earth to their neighbors beyond the grave, creating a community transcending time.
I began this book hoping to write a history of communal religion that, without completely forgetting heretics and mendicants, left them mostly in the background so that the vast majority who were neither might be seen. As I worked on this book, I found it impossible to leave heretics and mendicants totally unremarked. So I have added an epilogue treating both. The mendicant orders arose in the world of communal piety and ultimately came to dominate it. In the Epilogue, I sketch the impact of the mendicants’ rise to hegemony. The friars slowly replaced the lay penitents as the religious presence in city government. Their great churches refashioned the religious geography of the cities, and their spiritual authority remolded lay piety. By the end of the communal period, lay sainthood pretty much demanded affiliation with the mendicants through one of their “third orders.” Ironically, the friars arose from the lay religiosity of the communes, but in the end, as clerics, they came to dominate it. Their role in the transformation of communal piety, which was a long progressive development, deserves a study of its own. The friars, often as inquisitors, became arbiters of orthodoxy and opponents of dissent. Their definition of deviance, like the papacy’s, differed from that of the older lay orthodoxy. By the late 1200s, the older freelance lay spirituality that produced the communal saints began to look suspect and some of its most revered practitioners dubious. The conservatism, independence, and simpleminded rituals of lay spirituality looked unformed and perhaps adulterated by theological deviance. The mendicants aggressively directed urban religiosity in new ways. Shrines of dubious saints were destroyed; laypeople who escaped clerical tutelage became suspect. It was the inquisitors’ harassment of the traditionally orthodox, with their old-fashioned piety and devotions, more than the burning of heretics that fed popular resentment against the Holy Office. As the civic religion of the Italian republics was transformed, the homely holiness it nurtured passed into oblivion, but not without protest. My epilogue concludes by recounting a conflict over orthodoxy that pitched the lay population of Bologna against the Dominican inquisition there in 1299. In the wake of that conflict, the inquisitors interrogated more than 350 laypersons and investigated, among other things, the ways in which they conceived of “practical orthodoxy”—the beliefs and practices that led people’s neighbors to consider them members in good standing of the Catholic community of the city.
These laypeople’s responses to the inquisitor nicely confirmed the image
of day-to-day religiosity I had formed during my research on this project. This
book is itself a homage to the lost holiness of the Italian republics; I dedicate
it to the unexceptional Italian men and women who were its practitioners.
© 2006 The Penn State University