Signorie italiane e modelli monarchici (secoli XIII–XIV), ed. Paolo Grillo
Le signorie cittadine in Toscana: Esperienze di potere e forme di governo personale (secoli XIII–XV), ed. Andrea Zorzi

Extract

When Otto of Freising visited Italy in the twelfth century alongside Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he was confronted with a political system that seemed to him quite unlike his own. The entire land was ‘divided amongst the cities’, to which the countryside was subjected; and though the bishop and chronicler looked contemptuously upon a system that had elevated craftsmen to positions of authority, he simultaneously credited it for Italy’s renewed wealth and power. The cities would soon defeat the emperor; but already, to Otto, the Italian political system appeared as something altogether unique.

Without denying that uniqueness, these two volumes of essays, both belonging to the ‘Italia comunale e signorile’ series published by Viella under the general editorship of Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur and Andrea Zorzi, attempt to qualify it somewhat. The cities that defeated Barbarossa would also in many cases soon fall subject to their own signori. The volume edited by Paolo Grillo explores the importance in these cities of monarchical models. Medieval Italy may have been a land of communes, but it was also the Regnum Italicum of the empire: it was home to Frederick II of Hohenstaufen; and after him, to the houses of Anjou and Aragon; to princes of the French royal house, regularly; to emperors, occasionally; and, sometimes, to the pope. Italians and oltramontani were often visitors in each other’s lands (especially for business), and the curiosity was by no means one way. Dante was not the only one to see in imperial monarchy the ‘panacea’ to Italy’s ills (p. 9). Moreover, as Grillo notes, monarchy held an obvious appeal to signori who had often risen on the back of popular sovereignty, but now looked to more legitimate means of justifying and then consolidating their power: by the dawn of the Quattrocento, most were ‘no longer signori, but princes’ (p. 10). Gillo thus issues a call ‘to situate the Italian Middle Ages better in the main stream of European history’ (p. 15).