Abstract
After a weighty monograph (Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150), 1 Chris Wickham comes back to medieval Italy for a magisterial synthesis, shifting the focus from the capital to the core of the grand national narrative of the past. The links between the two works are evident, not only because Rome is one of the three detailed case studies (together with Milan and Pisa) taken into account in the first part of Sleepwalking into a New World, before a more structural survey of other communes, but it is also the inclusion of the ‘Eternal City’ within the Italian communal area, which follows coherently (and expands, from a specific point of view) the purpose, declared by Wickham in Medieval Rome, ‘to situate, as much as possible, the history of Rome inside that of Italy’. 2
Indeed, this is not a completely new perspective, since Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, in his 2011 book, L’altra Roma: Una Storia dei Romani All’epoca dei Comuni, 3 already made a successful attempt to write a history of the ‘urbe’ in High Middle Ages ‘without the Popes’, bucking both the old historiographical trend of Rome’s extraneousness to social and political events of the rest of the Peninsula and the traditional image of its inexorable decadence after the ancient splendour of the classical age. (Incidentally, it seems significant to emphasise that this approach was adopted by two non-Italian scholars). Nonetheless, Wickham’s merits are unquestionable on this question. The comparative key systematically used in Sleepwalking into a New World makes the Roman case in a very original and immediate way, even with its peculiarities, so deeply (and profitably) a part of communal Italy. The book will surely become a milestone in this field of study, both for its contents and methods.
If the object—and the chronological extent—of the book is revealed by the subheading, the original content of Wickham’s work has to be found in the very appealing (and only seemingly enigmatic) title. The ‘emergence of the Italian city communes’, in Wickham’s view, is rather later than historians have traditionally argued. The slow, non-linear sequence of the events that forerun the institutional crystallisation of the new regime seems to suggest more than merely informal practices of government at the beginning of that experience. It does coincide—Wickham aims to demonstrate—with a real ‘sleepwalking into a new world’, whose beginnings can be traced back to different levels of precocity, and whose developments can lengthen more or less, depending on specific local situations. This was significantly generalised in the whole communal area and definitively ended only in the mid-twelfth century (1150), exactly as in the monograph on Rome, being the endpoint of Wickam’s discussion.
However, Wickham is not completely isolated. He engages in a dense long-range dialogue with some continuitist readings, both in the slow and late documentary definition of the Italian communes’ identity and of the word ‘commune’ itself, as shown in a fundamental study by Ottavio Banti. 4 There is an asynchronicity (or, at the very least, a non-automatic coincidence) between the first mention of communal leaders (generally named consules) and the official birth date of a ‘commune’. But what makes Wickham’s book deeply original is the radicalisation of its proposal, that does not merely consist in placing the definitive formalisation of communal institutions after about fifty years from their first documentary evidences. Wickham, as compared with Hagen Keller, on this point is not just postponing the moment in which a ‘real’ commune is fully established, after a first, informal (or ‘latent’, using the very fitting formula of Giuliano Milani) 5 , phase, but, more generally, invites us to revise our traditional views on the communes’ origins, definitively dismissing any determinist reading: with regards to the elites that created the first non-monarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, there is no evidence that there was any awareness that they were doing anything new (p. 6). It was a real sleepwalking, and the new world arose out of any long-term strategy. On the basis of a large quantity of charters, and, whenever it is possible (i.e., mainly for Genoa, Milan, Pisa and Rome), by constantly interlacing documents with narrative and legislative sources, he outlines a persuasive description of a ‘new world’. Its most outstanding features are specific needs of defensive reactions, a certain amount of improvisation, a continuous state of sperimentalism and a keen sense of pragmatism. In all truth, the last two aspects can be regarded as structural of the entire communal history, even of the later, much more mature one (considering the long and complicated institutional trial that preceded the emergence of the podestà regime between the twelfth and thirteenth century). 6 On the other hand, a discussion of the rise of the Italian communes in terms of tactical defenses to the institutional breakdown of the kingdom and to the local (and consequent) political crises is particularly interesting for capturing the original nature of the new bodies of government and avoiding, at the same time, all the threadbare historiographical myths of urban liberty, proto-democracy and incipient modern republicanism that are normally associated with the new regime.
In Sleepwalking into a New World, there is no space for revolutionary events, and the city communes (with the partial exceptions of Rome, Cremona and Arezzo) ‘were not usually the result of open conflict’ against the traditional powers (p. 9). Instead, we can generally notice non-traumatic changes in the passage from the old bishopric hegemony to the new consular leadership, a strong continuity of men and structures of government, sometimes with an ordered, hierarchised cooperation (visible in Asti and, above all, in Milan, from the end of the eleventh century up to the 1130s).
Pointing out this continuity, Wickham, of course, does not aim to underestimate the radical novelty embodied by the communal phenomenon. He is well aware that a certain duration of a group of capitanei, military aristocrats defined by feudo-vassalic relationships with bishops, is too limited, both chronologically and spatially, to overplay ‘the importance of feudal ties in communal analyses’ (p. 14). Therefore, more than with the famous (and very controversial) book by Keller on the society of orders, 7 Wickham particularly engages with Maire Vigueur’s Cavaliers et Citoyens 8 and with its main thesis of a political core of the commune across the twelfth century, characterised by the ‘militia’, a collectivity of mounted warriors, including lesser landowners and richer members of the mercantile, artisanal, judicial and notarial strata, comprising 10–15 per cent of the urban population. Although Wickham acknowledges to Maire Vigueur the great merit of having ‘given a new framing to research in this field’ and shown how ‘communal activity belonged to a relatively wide stratum’ (p. 14), he expresses some doubts about the total homogeneity of the militarised political elite. For him, more helpful ‘to get closer to real social and political differences of the early city communes’ is to introduce a stratification inside Maire Vigueur’s urban mounted militia based on wealth: landowners with substantial rural and urban holdings, lesser landowners with some commercial interests and a ‘medium elite’ of judicial officials. It is the interplay of these strata that determined the formation and nature of consular communal government in the first decade of the twelfth century. It is the same dynamic interplay and the continuous change of those social hegemonies (visible again in Milan, with the substantial pre-eminence of the ‘medium elite’ after a first aristocratic period) that can help one understand the ad hoc, improvisational nature of earlier communal development: the ‘sleepwalking into a new world’ by the new urban leaders, the lack of a large-scale strategy, except for (at least in the major cities) a clear plan of occupation of the rural territories, the contado, almost from the beginning. Indeed, despite a range of very diverse local experiences and precocity of communal consolidations, ‘only military commitment’, Wickham says, ‘was there in every case from the start’ (p. 189). It was so much earlier than the other elements of the ideal-type commune: ‘assemblies, consuls with rotating offices, regularised court proceedings, legislation’. When they all were definitively formalised, in the 1150s, and the ‘sleepwalking into a new world’ finally ended, the long-standing experience gained in the military field turned out to be the winning card in the direct clash with Frederick Barbarossa and his pretenses on a little (but singularly rich and politically complex) word that had radically changed from the end of the eleventh century.