Download PDF | Trevor Dean - The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages - (2000).
263 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The towns of later medieval Italy were one of the high points of urban society and culture in Europe before the industrial revolution. They also produced huge amounts of written material, which is exceptional in quality and quantity for the Middle Ages: ‘More source materials survive than a hundred scholars could adequately master.’1 For almost every town in the north and centre there survive chronicles and voluminous collections of statute-law; for many cities there are the records of executive decision-making, of taxation and of trials; from Tuscany especially there is a wonderful outpouring of poetry and stories (novelle); for the history of the church and religion there are sermons, and records of the trials of heretics and the canonisation of saints, as well as the more humdrum deeds of property-owning; for private individuals there are letters, diaries, and mountains of notarial contracts.
Guilds and confraternities produced statutes, membership lists and registers of their activities; men of the church and the universities produced works of law, theology and political theory; businesses produced account books and commercial correspondence; governments produced legislation, treaties, proclamations, letters, tax lists. Little of this huge mass of material has been translated, or ever published. The only areas to receive any sort of consistent coverage are Florence and the artistic/humanist ‘Renaissance’: translations include some early chronicles and later diaries,2 art historical documents,3 humanism,4 and Florentine society.5
This means that, for most of Italy, for most of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there is little available in modern English translation. This volume is intended to fill that gap, by providing a more inclusive and balanced coverage of Italian urban life in the period. There are of course difficulties with such volumes, at both practical and theoretical levels. Roberto Lopez and Irving Raymond, editors of a previous collection that drew heavily on Italian material, observed: ‘Our task was not easy, to pick a mere few out of an immense number of records.’
A small number of documents cannot give a complete picture, they warned, no matter how carefully selected, and they hoped that readers would ‘not look for what is missing, but for what is included’.6 Such sentiments are shared by this editor. Bordone, editor of a similar collection of documents in Italian,7 identified two risks faced by compilations of documents: that they construct, with fragments of real cities, an inexistent city; and that they flatten development over time.8 Similar objections have been made, at a more general level, regarding anthologies: that, in making ‘a single book out of clippings from many books’, they create ‘an illusion of composite authorship’, and take extracts out of context, forcing them into association with other extracts, devaluing each with ‘the same negative poison’.9 These risks and objections can of course be avoided and answered.
The risk of creating an inexistent city can be addressed through the use of contrasting extracts, as is attempted in places here. The risk of flattening development can be addressed by including several documents from different periods from the same cities, again as attempted here. The charge of putting texts into ‘forced associations’ is willingly acknowledged: it is precisely in such associations that the value of a selection of sources lies. In an era of critical theory in which the author is seen less as the sole and deliberate creator and more an orchestrator of divergent voices, such objections to anthologies fall away. It is worth remembering, too, that medieval writers loved anthologies.
In looking for the chief features of Italian communal cities, we might point to the following: the unity of city and dependent countryside (contado), the stability of population, urban functions (religious, economic, military and political), the development of public spaces, social composition (the coexistence of landowners, traders and artisans), the development of autonomous institutions, and civic culture.10 All of these elements are also present in this volume, though within five broader thematic chapters. The buildings and their decoration, and urban ‘social services’ form the subject of Chapter I: the cathedrals and town halls, the towers and palaces, the paintings and statues, the prisons, street-paving and fountains; the hospitals and schools, and the efforts to control and regulate activities and waste.
Civic religion is addressed in Chapter II: the feast-days of urban patron saints, the devotion of urban inhabitants as manifested in the cult of official and unofficial saints and in the performance of miracles, the conflicts between communes and the local church, the problem of heresy, the clerical attack on usury, and the confraternities that relieved urban poverty. Chapter III explores production and commerce: the effects of monetary affluence, the guilds and markets, government interventions to stimulate production, to regulate exchange, and to control the city’s population. The longest chapter – Chapter IV – deals with social groups and social tensions: popolo against magnates, noble clans against each another, men against women, young men against city elders, Christians against Jews, freemen against slaves, food riots and tax revolts, acts of resistance and indecency.
Finally, Chapter V examines the great variety of political regimes in late-medieval Italy: from consolidated communes such as Florence or Venice, to stable or unstable ‘tyrannies’ in Pisa, Ferrara or Verona, and finally to the creation of regional states in which communes with their own traditions of proud independence – in this case Pisa and Padua – were absorbed by their greater and more powerful neighbours. Every selection of documents bears the editor’s imprint. Three principles have underlain the choice of documents in this book. The first is a desire to present material from as many different cities and as many different writers as possible. Thus material from the great cities – Milan, Florence, Venice, Genoa – is naturally included, but alongside it are documents from second-rank cities such as Padua or Ferrara, and from small towns such as Fermo and L’Aquila.
I have also attempted to include some documents from the south (doubtless insufficient in number and range to satisfy its historians) to illustrate some of the ways in which urban life there was different from that in the communes of the north and centre: though historians of southern towns speak of their autonomy,11 it is autonomy of a different order when Brindisi had to petition the king in order to appoint a new physician [22], or when Chieti had to seek the king’s support against a neighbouring count pursuing his vassals [72]. Second, my search for inclusiveness and balance has meant avoiding the familiar. It might seem to some critics that I have produced an ‘Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch’, but without either Dante or Petrarch. My answer would be that these canonical authors have translations enough already: Dante’s great poem, the Divine Comedy, though arguably untranslatable, has recently received numerous versions in English.
The same reasoning excludes Boccaccio.12 I have, though, included considerable material from two prose authors where existing translations exist, but for good reason: the selections from Villani published in 1906 are now old-fashioned and out of print;13 the full translation of Salimbene’s chronicle published in 1986 is unfortunately defective, with many omissions and misunderstandings.14 Finally, a third principle is to reflect some of my own concerns in the ‘minor’ history of Italy (Ferrara), and in the behaviour and mores of the nobility (vendetta, knighthood).
I have aimed for fairly literal translation, while often reshaping sentences in order to obtain smoother effects (turning passive into active verbs, and adjectives into adverbs, for example, or breaking up lengthy preambles with their many subordinate clauses). I have also lightly edited some texts in order to remove repetitive or obscure material and to clarify the sense. There are two important words that I have frequently left in Italian or Latin, and they cause all translators problems: one is stato/status, which has a meaning combining government, regime, power and state; and the other is popolo, and its derivatives popolani/populares, which never included the whole people, and was sometimes restricted to ‘the better sort’.
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