The Communes of Lombardy from the VI. to the X. Century / An Investigation of the Causes Which Led to the Development of Municipal Unity Among the Lombard Communes.

by William Klapp Williams

I do not mean to imply that we must in any measure ignore the passive force and influence of the old forms on the new. The old veins receive the new blood; the new torrent, overrunning everything at first with the strength of its new life, will find again, even if it deepen, the channel of the old river: a vanquished civilization will always subdue and at the same time raise its barbarous conquerors, if they come of a stock capable of appreciating civilizing influences. In the present case this means that the men of the North brought the new ideas that were to form modern history, and let their growth be directed and assisted, while they were yet too young to stand alone, by some of the framework which had been built up by the long experience of their Southern neighbors.

To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study, this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the government of the Italian communes was purely Roman in its forms and in its conception, or purely Teutonic. The supporters of neither theory can be said to be in the right. You cannot say that the average city government was entirely Roman or entirely Teutonic, either in the laws which guided it, or in the channels by which these laws were executed and expressed. I think much time and much learning have been spent on a discussion both fruitless and unnecessary. We cannot err if we subject the question to a consideration at once critical and impartial.

The widely differing opinions eagerly supported by different writers on this point, form a very good example of the deceiving influence of national feeling on the judgment in matters of historical criticism. For, on the one hand, we find many German writers ignoring entirely the old framework of Roman organization, and recognizing only the new Teutonic life which gave back to it the strength it had lost; on the other, a host of lesser Italian writers who magnify certain old names and forms, and mistake them for the substance, making all the new life of Italy but the return of a past, which belonged to a greatness that was dead. Many there are of this school in Italy, where you will often find to-day a commune of three hundred inhabitants, with its one or two constables wearing the imperial badge, "Senatus Populusque Albanensis" or "Verulensis," as the case may be. Truly a suggestive anachronism! It is true that in remote ages especially, when the records of history are few and uncertain—and the period we are considering in this paper can almost be called the prehistoric age of municipal institutions in Northern Italy—much can be learned and much truth inferred from the evidence of a name. But this is a species of evidence we can never be too cautious in using, as the temptation is always to infer too much rather than too little.

In the following pages I will try to sift the evidence obtainable, with the impartiality of one trammeled by the support of no particular theory; always bearing in mind, however, one fact, all-important in a study where so much depends on nomenclature, namely, to give that shade of meaning and that amount of weight to any term which it possessed in the age in which it was used, carefully distinguishing this from its use in any earlier or later age. The importance of this caution will be soon seen when we come to discuss the origin of corporate life in the communes, where many have been misled by attaching to the words respublica and civitas, for example, so continually recurring in the old laws and charters, a meaning which was entirely foreign to the terms at the period of their use. With this warning, we will turn to a consideration of the first effects of the inroad of the northern barbarians on the cities, whose exhausted and defenseless state has already been pointed out.

One of the chief characteristics of the Teutonic tribes which overran Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries, was an innate hatred of cities, of enclosing walls and crowded habitations. Children of the field and the forest, they had their village communities and their hundreds, their common land and their allotted land, but these were small restrictions on their free life, and left an extended "air-space" for each individual and his immediate household. Homestead was not too near homestead, each man being separated from his neighbor by the extent of half the land belonging to each. The centralization of population in city life was a thing undreamed of, and an idea abhorred, alike for its novelty and for the violence it did to the as yet untrained instincts of the people. The strong, independent individualism of the Teutonic freeman rebelled against anything which would in any way limit his freedom of action: "ne pati quidem inter se junctas sedes," says Tacitus.[3] An agriculturist in his rude way, he lived on the land which supported him and his family, and feeling no further need, his untrained intelligence could form no conception of the necessities and the advantages of the social union and interdependence of a more civilized state of society; nor could he comprehend the mutual relations of the individual to the immediate community in which he lived.

He could understand his own relation to and dependence on the state as a whole; alone he could not repel the attacks of neighboring tribes, alone he could not go forth to conquer new lands or increase the number of his herds. But why he should associate with others and so limit the freedom which was his birthright, for other purposes than those of attack and defense, of electing a leader for war, or getting his allotment of land in peace, was altogether beyond the horizon of his comprehension. He was sufficient unto himself for all the purposes of his daily life; to the product of his own plough and hunting-spear he looked for the maintenance of himself and his family, and the loose organization which we may call the state existed simply so as to enable him to live in comparative peace, or gain advantage in war—perhaps the first example of the new power in state-craft which was to revolutionize the political principles of the world; the individual lived no longer simply to support the state, but the state existed solely to protect and aid the individual.

If all this be true of the Teutonic nations in general, in the earlier stages of their development, particularly true is it of the Lombards,[4] a wild tribe of the Suevic stock, whose few appearances in history, previous to their invasion of Italy, are connected only with the fiercest strife and the rudest forms of barbarism. History seems to have proved that tradition has maligned the Vandal; the Goth can boast a ruler raised at the centre of Eastern civilization and refinement; but the Lombard of the invasion can never appear as other than the rude barbarian rushing from his wild northern home, and forcing on a defenseless people the laws and the customs suited to his own rugged nature and the unformed state of society in which he lived.

Such being the case, there is little cause for wonder that the invading Lombard directed his fury with particular violence against the corporate towns, whose strength was not sufficient to resist the attacks of his invading host. Like all other Teutonic tribes the Lombards were entirely unskilled in the art of attacking fortified towns; hence the only mode of siege with which they were acquainted was that of starving out the inhabitants, by cutting off all source of supply by ravaging and destroying the surrounding country. This fact, unimportant as it may seem at the first glance, materially affected the whole course of the later history of some of the Italian cities. By this means we are enabled, even at this early epoch, to divide them into two classes. First, those cities which, after a more or less short resistance, yielded to the rude tactics of the barbarians and were made subject by them, for example Milan and Pavia.[5] Second, those cities like Venice and Ravenna,[6] which, by means of a connection with the sea which the invaders could not cut off, were enabled to gain supplies by water, and so resist all efforts of the besieging host to capture them. They never fell completely under the Lombard yoke, and either retained a sort of partial autonomy or yielded allegiance to some other power. It is the cities of the former class that are the subject of this investigation.

The condition of these inland towns at the time of the invasion was, as we have seen, weak in the extreme. The defenses, where they existed, were of a character to afford little protection, and the bulk of the inhabitants were so enervated from a life of poverty and oppression that they were almost incapable of offering any resistance in their own defense. They were reduced to such a condition as to be only too grateful if their rough conquerors, after an easy victory, disdainfully spared their lives, and left them to occupy their dismantled dwellings.

This seems to have been the almost universal method of procedure. The Lombards did not in any sense, at first, think of occupying the conquered cities; for the reasons already given they despised, because they could not yet comprehend, the life of the civilian. They contented themselves with pulling down the walls, razing the fortifications, and destroying every mark which would make of the city anything but an aggregate of miserable dwellings. The inhabitants were for the most part spared, and left to enjoy, if the term can be used for such an existence, what the conquerors did not think worth the having. These felt the fruits of their victory to lie in the rich arable lands of the surrounding plains, and here they settled down, each in his own holding, portioned out by lot to every soldier; the town being considered but as a part of the civitas or district, if I may use the term, of the dux or overlord, from whom the several milites, or landholders of the surrounding territory, had their tenure, and who himself held directly from the king.