Long before the last stage, the rule of signori, was reached, however, the commune as originally constituted had everywhere undergone radical changes. As early as the 13th century the lower orders among the inhabitants formed an organization under officers of their own, side by side with that of the commune, which was controlled by the great and the rich; e.g. at Florence the people in 1250 rose against the turbulent nobles and chose a capitano del popolo with twelve anziani, two from each of the six city-wards (sestieri), as his council. The popolo itself was divided into twenty armed companies, each under a gonfaloniere. But later the arti (craft-gilds), some of whom, however, can be shown to have existed under consuls of their own as early as 1203, attained supreme importance, and in 1282 the government was placed in the hands of their priori, under the name of the signoria. The Guelph nobles were at first admitted to a share in the government, on condition of their entering a gild, but in 1293 even this privilege was withdrawn. The ordinamenti della giustizia of that year robbed the nobility of all political power. The lesser or lower arti, on the other hand, were conceded a full share in it, and a gonfaloniere della giustizia was placed at the head of the militia. In the 14th century twelve buoni uomini representing the wards (sestieri) were superadded, all these dignitaries holding office for two months only. And besides all these, there existed three competing chief justices and commanders of the forces called in from abroad and holding office for six months, viz. the podestà, the capitano del popolo, and the esecutore della giustizia. In spite of all this complicated machinery of checks and balances, revolution followed upon revolution, nor could an occasional reign of terror be prevented like that of the Signore Gauthier de Brienne, duke of Athens (1342-1343). It was not till after a rising of the lowest order of all, the industrial labourers, had been suppressed in 1378 (tumulto dei Ciompi, the wool-combers), that quieter times ensued under the wise leadership, first of the Albizzi and finally of the Medici.
The history of the other Tuscan towns was equally tumultuous, all of them save Lucca, after many fitful changes finally passing under the sway of Florence, or the grand-duchy of Tuscany, as the state was now called. Pisa, one time the mightiest, had been crushed between its inland neighbour and its maritime rival Genoa (battle of Meloria, 1282).
Apart in its constitutional development from all other towns in Italy, and it might be added, in Europe, stands Venice. Almost alone among Italian cities its origin does not go back to Roman times. It was not till the invasions of Hun and Langobard that fugitives from the Venetian mainland took refuge among the poor fishermen on the small islands in the lagoons and on the lido—the narrow stretch of coast-line which separates the lagoons from the Adriatic—some at Grado, some at Malamocco, others on Rialto. A number of small communities was formed under elected tribunes, acknowledging as their sovereign the emperor at Constantinople. Treaties of commerce were concluded with the Langobard kings, thus assuring a market for the sale of imports from the East and for the purchase of agricultural produce. Just before or after A.D. 700 the young republic seems to have thrown off the rule of the Byzantine dux Histriae et Venetiae and elected a duke (doge) of its own, in whom was vested the executive power, the right to convoke the popular assembly (concio) and appoint tribunes and justices. Political unity was thus established, but it was not till after another century of civil war that Rialto was definitely chosen the seat of government and thus the foundation of the present city laid. After a number of attempts to establish a hereditary dukedom, Duke Domenico Flabianico in 1032 passed a law providing that no duke was to appoint his successor or procure him to be elected during his own lifetime. Besides this two councils were appointed without whose consent nothing of importance was to be done. After the murder by the people of Duke Vitale Michiel in 1172, who had suffered naval defeat, it was deemed necessary to introduce a stricter constitutional order. According to the orthodox account, some details of which have, however, recently been impugned,[11] the irregular popular meeting was replaced by a great council of from 450 to 480 members elected annually by special appointed electors in equal proportion from each of the six wards. One of the functions of this body was to appoint most of the state officials or their electors. There was also an executive council of six, one from each ward. Besides these, the duke, who was henceforward elected by a body of eleven electors from among the aristocracy, would invite persons of prominence (the pregadi) in order to secure their assent and co-operation, whenever a measure of importance was to be placed before the great council. Only under extraordinary circumstances the concio was still to be called. The tenure of the duke’s office was for life. The general tendency of constitutional development in Venice henceforward ran in an exactly opposite direction to that of all other Italian cities towards a growing restriction of popular rights, until in 1296 the great council was for all future time closed to all but the descendants of a limited number of noble families, whose names were in that year entered in the Golden Book. It still remained to appoint a board to superintend the executive power. These were the avvogadori di commune, and, since Tiepolo’s conspiracy in 1310, the Consiglio dei Dieci, the Council of Ten, which controlled the whole of the state, and out of which there developed in the 16th century the state inquisition.
While in all prominent Italian cities the leading classes of the community were largely made up of merchants, in Venice the nobility was entirely commercial. The marked steadiness in the evolution of the Venetian constitution is no doubt largely due to this fact. Elsewhere the presence of large numbers of turbulent country nobles furnished the first germ for the unending dissensions which ruined such promising beginnings. In Venice, on the contrary, its businesslike habits of mind led the ruling class to make what concessions might seem needful, while both the masses and the head of the state were kept in due subjection to the laws. Too much stability, however, finally changed into stagnation, and decay followed. The foreign policy of Venice was likewise mainly dictated by commercial motives, the chief objectives being commercial privilege in the Byzantine empire and in the Frankish states in the East, domination of the Adriatic, occupation of a sufficient hinterland on the terra firma, non-sufferance of the rivalry of Genoa, and, finally, maintenance of trade-supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean through a series of alternating wars and treaties with Turkey, the lasting monument of which was the destruction of the Parthenon in 1685 by a Venetian bomb. At last the proud republic surrendered to Napoleon without a stroke.
The cities of southern Italy do not here call for special attention. Several of them developed a certain amount of independence and free institutions, and took an important part in trade with the East, notably so Amalfi. But after incorporation in the Norman kingdom all individual history for them came to an end.
Rome, finally, derived its importance from being the capital of the popes and from its proud past. From time to time spasmodic attempts were made to revive the forms of the ancient republic, as under Arnold of Brescia in the 12th and by Niccolò di Rienzo in the 14th century; but there was no body of stalwart, self-reliant citizens to support such measures: nothing but turbulent nobles on the one hand and a rabble on the other.
In no country is there such a clear grouping of the towns on geographical lines as in France, these geographical lines, of course, having in the first instance been drawn by historical causes. Another feature is the extent to which, in the unruly times preceding the civic movement, serfdom had spread among the inhabitants even of the towns throughout the greater part of the country, and the application of feudal ideas to town government. In some other respects the constitution of the cities in the south of France, as will be seen, has more in common with that of the Italian communes, and that of the northern French towns with those of Germany, than the constitutions of the various groups of French towns have among each other.
In the group of the villes consulaires, comprising all important towns in the south, the executive was, as in Italy, in the hands of a body of consules, whose number in most cases rose to twelve. They were elected for the term of one year and re-eligible only after an interval, and they were supported by a municipal council (commune consilium, consilium magnum or secretum or generale, or colloquium) and a general assembly (parlamentum, concio, commune consilium, commune, universitas civium), which, however, as a rule was far from comprising the whole body of citizens. Another feature which these southern towns had in common with their Italian neighbours was the prominent part played by the native nobility. The relations with the clergy were generally of a more friendly character than in the north, and in some cases the bishop or archbishop even retained a considerable influence in the management of the town’s affairs. Dissensions among the citizens, or between the nobles and the bourgeois, frequently ended in the adoption of a podestat. And in several cities of the Languedoc, each of the two classes composing the population retained its separate laws and customs. It is matter of dispute whether vestiges of Roman institutions had survived in these parts down to the time when the new constitutions sprang into being; but all investigators are pretty well agreed that in no case did such remnants prove of any practical importance. Roman law, however, was never quite superseded by Germanic law, as appears from the statuts municipaux. In the improvement and expansion of these statutes a remarkable activity was displayed by means of an annual correctio statutorum carried out by specially appointed statutores. In the north, on the other hand, the carta communiae, forming as it were the basis of the commune’s existence, seems to have been considered almost as something sacred and unchangeable.
The constitutional history of the communes in northern France in a number of points widely differed from that of these villes consulaires. First of all the movement for their establishment in most cases was to a far greater degree of a revolutionary character. These revolutions were in the first place directed against the bishops; but the position both of the higher clergy and of the nobility was here of a nature distinctly more hostile to the aspirations of the citizens than it was in the south. As a result the clergy and the nobles were excluded from all membership of the commune, except inasmuch as that those residing in the town might be required to swear not to conspire against it. The commune (communia, communa, communio, communitas, conjuratio, confoederatio) was formed by an oath of mutual help (sacramentum, juramentum communiae). The members were described as jurati (also burgenses, vicini, amici), although in some communes that term was reserved for the members of the governing body. None but men of free and legitimate birth, and free from debt and contagious or incurable disease were received. The members of the governing body were styled jurés (jurati), pairs (pares) or échevins (scabini). The last was, however, as in Germany, more properly the title of the jurors in the court of justice, which in many cases remained in the hands of the lord. In some cases the town council developed out of this body; but in the larger cities, like Rouen, several councils worked and all these names were employed side by side. The number of the members of the governing body proper varies from twelve to a hundred, and its functions were both judicial and administrative. There was also known an arrangement corresponding to the German alte und sitzende Rat, viz. of retired members who could be called in to lend assistance on important occasions. The most striking distinction, however, as against the villes consulaires was the elevation of the president of the body to the position of maire or mayeur (sometimes also called prévôt, praepositus). As elsewhere, at first none but the civic aristocracy were admitted to take part in the management of the town’s affairs; but from the end of the 13th century a share had to be conceded to representatives of the crafts. Dissatisfaction, however, was not easily allayed; the lower orders applied for the intervention of the king; and that effectively put an end to political freedom. This tendency of calling in state help marks a most striking difference as against the policy followed by the German towns, where all classes appear to have been always far too jealous of local independence. The result for the nation was in the one case despotism, equality and order, in the other individual liberty and an inability to move as a whole. At an earlier stage the king had frequently come to the assistance of the communes in their struggle with their lords. By-and-by the king’s confirmation came to be considered necessary for their lawful existence. This proved a powerful lever for the extension of the king’s authority. It may seem strange that in France the towns never had recourse to those interurban leagues which played so important a part in Italian and in German history.
These two varieties, the communes and the villes consulaires together form the group of villes libres. As opposed to these stand the villes franches, also called villes prévotales after the chief officer, villes de bourgeoisie or villes soumises. They make up by far the majority of French towns, comprising all those situated in the centre of the kingdom, and also a large number in the north and the south. They are called villes franches on account of their possessing a franchise, a charter limiting the services due by the citizens to their lord, but political status they had little or none. According to the varying extent of the liberties conceded them, there may be distinguished towns governed by an elective body and more or less fully authorized to exercise jurisdiction; towns possessing some sort of municipal organization, but no rights of jurisdiction, except that of simple police; and, thirdly, those governed entirely by seignorial officers. To this last class belong some of the most important cities in France, wherever the king had power enough to withhold liberties deemed dangerous and unnecessary. On the other hand, towns of the first category often come close to the villes libres. A strict line of demarcation, however, remains in the mutual oath which forms the basis of the civic community in both varieties of the latter, and in the fact that the ville libre stands to its lord in the relation of vassal and not in that of an immediate possession. But however complètement assujettie Paris might be, its organization, naturally, was immensely more complex than that of hundreds of smaller places which, formally, might stand in an identical relationship to their lords. Like other villes franches under the king, Paris was governed by a prévôt (provost), but certain functions of self-government for the city were delegated to the company of the marchands de l’eau, mercatores aquae, also called mercatores ansati, that is, the gild of merchants whose business lay down the river Seine, in other words, a body naturally exclusive, not, however, to the citizens as such. At their head stood a prévôt des marchands and four eschevins de la marchandise. Other prud’hommes were occasionally called in, and from 1296 prévôt and échevins, appointed twenty-four councillors to form with themselves a parloir aux bourgeois. The crafts of Paris were organized in métiers, whose masters were appointed, some by the prévôt de Paris, and some by certain great officers of the court. In the tax rolls of A.D. 1292 to 1300 no fewer than 448 names of crafts occur, while the Livre des métiers written in 1268 by Étienne de Boileau, then prévôt de Paris, enumerates 101 organized bodies of tradesmen or women and artisans. Among the duties of these bodies, as elsewhere, was the guet or night-watch, which necessitated a military organization under quartiniers, cinquantainiers and dixainiers. This gave them a certain power. But both their revolutions, under the prévôt des marchands, Étienne Marcel, after the battle of Maupertuis, and again in 1382, were extremely short-lived, and the only tangible result was a stricter subjection to the king and his officers.